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Beating a 35-Year Sentence: Smuggler’s Insane True Story
January 25, 2025
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Hi, I'm Jean Chatsky. You may know me as the host of the Her Money podcast or the financial editor of NBC's Today Show for 25 years.
It started with a scream inside a quiet Maryland home.
A mother trying to protect the family dog and her son in the grip of a violent hallucinogenic rage. By the time it was over, she was dead, and he claimed LSD made him do it. His name, David Minor IV, and we talked to him. Listen to Invisible Choir every other week as we uncover the most haunting true crimes you've never heard of, available wherever you get your podcasts.
You learn how to be a good drug dealer by experience. Nobody can teach you. And it's quite thrilling. Every cell in your body is trying to understand and be calm. My reality was so far out there, I could not even function.
and got put in a psych ward. I was shackled, legs, arms, hands, put me in front of a grade school and it really let me see of the bondage I was in. I knew I was being watched. I had the DEA, the FBI, and the CIA all around what I was doing. So my reputation started traveling back in Bolivia. We got a guy in the United States that
He pays and we trust him. He's like the president of a country and one of our allies. And then Reagan sends in troops to arrest Noriega. And there's a huge gun battle. I would die before I would tell on him. I didn't get in trouble. I didn't get shot. I mean, my friends were getting shot. I mean, I had no fear. Drove down the park and was walking in this alley and there was a beautiful Bolivian look like model.
Hey, this is Matt Cox and I'm here with Joe Tarsik and we're going to be talking about his story
Can I say drug smuggler? Yeah, interstate transportation or narcotics is what I got arrested for. But yeah, drug smuggler. Yeah, all the above. OK, all right. Do you want to go with that? Is that good? OK, I was going to say I was going to redo it, but.
Yeah, let's go with drug smuggler. Well, it's funny, you know, it's like people say, you know, oh, you were arrested for mortgage fraud. Now it's bank fraud. Like, you know, there is no mortgage fraud. So same thing. You're giving the technical name. Most people just say smuggler. I won. I appreciate you coming out, obviously. Let's let's just start at the beginning. Like, you know, where were you born? Your parents, brothers, sisters, anything like that? I was born in Washington, D.C. I have two older sisters. Dad was a military man.
My mom was considered the debutante and we lived on 17th and Upshur Street in Washington D.C. until I was three. You know, dad in the military didn't have a lot of money. Then we moved to Silver Spring in Maryland. But, you know, coming from a house that had a maid was, my grandmother was one of the wealthiest
Ladies in Washington and her husband died when I think he was 33 and my mom and the family lived with my grandmother before we moved out to Silver Spring. How old were you? I was three years old when we moved to Silver Spring. But your father was still in the military? He was still in the military, didn't retire. He went on to, got out of the military, got a job.
When we were in Silver Spring, the house cost them $15,000. At the end of a dirt road, they didn't have much money. He was trying to support the family with that military income, which didn't work. They were always fighting. It was only a two-bedroom house. My bedroom, I actually stayed in a crib.
in my mother and dad's bedroom until I was almost six years old. My sisters lived in the other room in the house. Very poor house, very poor at that time. How many sisters? Two sisters. So it's you and two sisters. Yeah. My dad came from a very poor background. His father was from Russia. They lived in upper state New York, never had running water. His dad went back to Russia when he was 15 years old.
He joined the Navy to take care of his three brothers and his mother. It was just a real bad scene. My grandfather could never speak English.
Very he was from i was a russian cossack and very rough on my grandmother all the stories were that he used to beat her it was very dark if you want to call it dark so you went to high school yeah yeah let me go back and just talk about my grandmother's side you know uh and my my mother's side was very wealthy and it was like uh two two opposites my mother growing up very in very wealthy family because of my grandfather and we'll get
down the road a little bit more about him and then you know my father being very poor them trying to work together back in Maryland now and now we're I'm at three years old in Silver Spring Maryland and at about age I guess third grade is went to a little school right in that little neighborhood and that's when they realized I had a problem with reading and writing and that was when
really the challenges started in my life.
You had some kind of a learning disability? Yeah, well, they call it dyslexia now. But back then there was no cure. Nobody knew. They thought there was something wrong. You know, the kid's a smart kid. Why can't he read and write? So that was kind of my... Same thing. He's got a good vocabulary. He communicates well. What's the problem? Yeah. When I was a kid, I could take an engine apart, put it back together, but I couldn't read and write. So something was off.
But so that's kind of where it was when I was young. You know, mom and dad didn't get along and continue to fight. And one traumatic thing that happened when I was growing up, when my father kind of grew up in that same thing like his dad would yell and scream, you know, my mom would hold me when I was young when they would fight. So my father wouldn't hit her. So that's how I grew up for my first six years from age
really it started age three to age six. And then the, you know, we were kind of in like a farmland back then. It was not very built up. And, you know, I had nobody ever watching over me or, you know, when I went home, nobody said, help him with his homework. Nobody, it was kind of like I was on my own because of all their problems. And then at age seven, I got,
went out to a barn and was playing with the kids and some older kids came out and the first time I got molested by a young man and that was the reading and the molestation was a traumatic and the way I brought up was brought up you know with the yelling and screaming kind of turned me into a shell of a person and just not confident and really struggling just socially in school and
They sent me to a special school called Hillcrest in Washington. They had to borrow money from my grandmother and that was a big deal. It was an hour drive to the school and back home and that's when all the arguing really started with my mother and father. So that's where that out of line growing up and that's where that kind of led to.
Did you graduate from that school? I graduated from that school and started learning more about my grandfather. As I was growing up, my family would really worship him. The money was still with my grandmother, even though it was years that he died.
And that in the book that I gave you, there's a picture of the mansion he built on 16th Street. He was one of the richest men in D.C., but he started smuggling liquor from Canada when he was probably 20 years old. And his dad was the chief of police in Washington. So they were really they were the little mob in Washington. Right. And that was my grandmother had
four daughters and my mother was the first one to have a boy so they named me after my grandfather so who was Joseph Marr and I was the first Joseph boy so I was really looked at to kind of hold the torch you know in my mind I was grown up to be like him and so that's how this all started forming those years of resentment and heading towards the problems with the drugs and
How did you
like did the reading get better or did they just kind of it got worse and it didn't get any better i went to the special school and i they still passed me i went to another special school in Wheaton that's a little farther away about and supposedly i was making progress after the one in hill and in dc and then when i got to seventh grade my sisters all graduated my
One sister was a homecoming queen, very prominent in the school and the teachers seemed to like me, but I still got put in a special class. But in gym class, one of the football coaches recognized that I was pretty athletic. And so that was really my key to going through school without ever learning how to read and write. Right. So I ended up lettering nine times.
football, wrestling, and track. I was athlete of the year in my senior class. They said I would be the most successful athlete. That was a big thing in me. I mean, I was a very introvert then. Of course, the girls and the attraction of sports led to a lot of fun. In my senior year, I started smoking pot, and that was really the doorway. Got a wrestling scholarship.
to Montgomery College. They paid for my books. That was the first semester. My fear when I got up in the morning, I was so fearful of somebody calling on me and having to speak in front of anybody. It was like torment. After wrestling class or the season, I said,
I can't do this. And so I was working as a plumber on the side, actually started that when I was 16, like a summer job to get ready for sports and it was hard work. And one of the guys in the neighborhood that
I went to high school with a really cool guy. I had a brand new car, a black guy, Afro. I was in a shop class and I used to wash his car and drive it around the parking lot, so that was a big deal, but we became friends. Actually, his brother, who I'm visiting with right now, his little brother, what was the alfalfa and what was the other guy?
Buckwheat. Buckwheat and alfalfa. That was our nicknames when we started the drugs. We really got along good. He was like the coolest, hippiest guy you could ever imagine. But he got arrested in my first year out of high school. He got arrested for bank robbery.
What year was this? I was 1972, I think he got around, I graduated in 1971. But we were friends since 10th grade, you know, even when I wasn't doing drugs, he was a cool guy. And it was another, him and another guy after I graduated from high school, a little bit of pot and, you know, they had a party and, you know, I started doing cocaine, I tried cocaine and that became my best friend. Right.
I could be socially accepted everywhere I went when I had that cocaine. That's where it really started. When I got to wrestling and left, I said, man, I was captain of the football team, captain of the wrestling team. I had a gift. I would
Even in sports, instead of telling people what to do, I would show them what to do. I would be a leader and example. And so, when this is a perfect opportunity, I think I've been bred for this because of my grandfather. I said, okay, well I started, first started getting high and just being a regular street dealer, you know, and then the cocaine became a little bit more important and then I could see how I could
take this bag or something and cut it a little bit and get my stash and also a lot of new friends. I thought they were friends at the time, but that was a way for me to feel like I was somebody. I could feel confident because I had no confidence. In sports, I had confidence, but that only lasts so long. That's a real high, the feeling sports gives you. It's good for your body and
But I recognized I took all my trophies and everything, threw them in the trash, and said, I know this isn't going to be my future. So that's kind of where it started before it got to where it ended up. So that continued to just, you know, what, bloom?
Well, you know, Dale was in jail. How long did he get? I think it was three years and they sent him to a camp up in West Virginia, a Morgantown, West Virginia.
And you know, then we started doing some acid and you know, so I took some acid drove up to West Virginia and had a visit with him and I had some cigars, broke them down, put some cocaine in there and you know, was bold enough to walk in there and give him that pack and you know, he got it and took it behind the bars and he got high. But he while he was in jail, there was a guy and I'll just say his first name Louie from New York and his dad was
It started with a scream inside a quiet Maryland home. A mother trying to protect the family dog and her son in the grip of a violent hallucinogenic rage. By the time it was over, she was dead.
And he claimed LSD made him do it. His name, David Minor IV, and we talked to him. Listen to Invisible Choir every other week as we uncover the most haunting true crimes you've never heard of, available wherever you get your podcasts.
I said, well, let's go. When he got out, I went up there to New York, I mean, up to West Virginia, drove him home. And we were tight. You know, we were brothers. And we ended up going back to New York and visiting East Houston Street. You know, here I'm a white guy and a black guy and we're going to a Spanish Harlem or wherever that was. And, you know, two guys met us with guns, you know, off packing. He walked us down the block.
And then we got the OK on the first floor and then, you know, every floor they had, they had guys sitting at the windows. And then when we got up to his room, you know, his his dad, which was the guy. I'll just tell you this story. It's amazing. This makes me makes me think of Frank Lucas from the American gangster. Yeah. Buried by the US government and ignored by the national media. This is the story they don't want you to know.
When Frank Amadeo met with President George W. Bush at the White House to discuss NATO operations in Afghanistan, no one knew that he'd already embezzled nearly $200 million from the federal government, money he intended to use to bankroll his plan to take over the world. From Amadeo's global headquarters in the shadow of Florida's Disney
With a nearly inexhaustible supply of the Internal Revenue Service's funds, Amadeo acquired multiple businesses, amassing a mega-conglomerate. Driven by his delusions of world conquest, he negotiated the purchase of a squadron of American fighter jets and the controlling interests in a former Soviet ICBM factory. He began work to build the largest private militia on the planet, over one million Africans strong. Simultaneously,
Amadeo hired an international black ops force to orchestrate a coup in the Congo while plotting to take over several small Eastern European countries. The most disturbing part of it all is, had the US government not thwarted his plans, he might have just pulled it off. It's insanity. The bizarre true story of a bipolar megalomaniac's insane plan for total world domination. Available now on Amazon and Audible.
So anyway, we got in there, you know, and I was fearless. I don't know how, why, you know, but here we got a black guy and a white guy and they could have thrown us in the river thinking that we were trying to set him up because Louis just got out of jail. And then his dad drives up in a limousine, just like TV, white hair.
comes in and he wouldn't go upstairs until they got the okay that I was okay because they thought you know of course everybody if you're if you're a drug dealer you're looking at everybody everybody's gonna set you up so but they came upstairs and that was the first time I ever did heroin they chopped it up showed us how to cut it it was brown you know there's a formula they had that they I forget how they
Mix the drugs and put it on the stove and cut the brown heroin, I think it was brown sugar or something, and then I did a big line.
Like I said, I never even did heroin before, and Dale did some. So by the time we got back to the train station, Dale could not even see. He couldn't hardly walk, and somehow the heroin didn't affect me like it did him. So I put the heroin in my sock, and we left him in the train station. He was in there, took all his clothes off, and he was sweating so bad he couldn't see. He was blind. I said, okay, I got to leave.
got on the train and you know thinking we were going to get a dog would be on the train and you know so that was the first real big experience of a mafia family and getting involved and it's quite thrilling you know you're you're you're at your peak of your of you know everything every cell in your body is is trying to understand it and and be calm and go through and so it got back home and that was the start of where we're continued to
Okay.
And I mean, how often did you make that trip or did you? Well, that was the first trip we went up. We started. I didn't really. After about six months, I almost got busted. Actually, another undercover agent from Montgomery County I actually grew up with since I was three years old. And I went to sell, give somebody a stash of heroin to see if they could
but they could be somebody that we could sell it and it was an old guy that was on the wrestling team and he got caught selling TVs and I didn't know he was trying to set me up. So this is the first time that I almost got arrested but I didn't and I knew
Why didn't I get arrested? I have no idea. So I was supposed to meet this guy at McDonald's and it just seems strange to me. This is where you learn how to be a good drug dealer by experience. Nobody can teach you. So I met this guy going to McDonald's. I can remember all this stuff like it was yesterday. So I walked in McDonald's and I just felt so funny and I saw a black car and I said something's not right. So I left McDonald's and
The next day I was over at another wrestler's house in Aspen Hill and I walked in and he says, oh yeah, he was kind of joking with me about being paranoid. He says, I got an undercover cop that lives right over there and I saw that exact car.
the night before or the evening before I was supposed to meet, I saw that one at McDonald's. So I realized that the undercover cop is the guy that I left the meeting and that kind of blew my mind that this guy would try to set me up. This was my first heroin transaction. I almost got busted. Right.
So with all that said, we started meeting. Louie came down from Maryland. They had another buy in our apartment that I got an apartment with that guy Dale and the Montgomery County on narcotics squad asked me to come in and they wanted to interview me.
And I went to my buddy, the guy that I grew up with was undercover and he kind of coached me. He says, they don't have you, but if you say something. Because they knew Dale was a bank robber and Dale had been dealing for years, so they knew that we lived together.
I went through that experience and realized
how to work through a situation with the police on me and getting back out. And, you know, you go through traumatic pressure through all this. I'm sure you understand that. And so that was the first time I got out of there, you know, moved out of the apartment with Dale and then got into trying to quit. I tried to quit dealing and that lasted about a week.
So that was my first experience with almost getting busted in the New York and really
Building a bond with Dale in his boldness, you know, he's pretty bold guy You know, there's certain things you got to be to be a good drug dealer and it's pretty bold, you know We were you know back then it was more of a thrill. It wasn't to shoot him up everything like it's become today, right? so how how long did this go on before um, well the
I found a couple people in town that were selling cocaine and went through learning about cocaine. That was the biggest thing, because everybody's got the best. You had to learn the quality.
and I started dealing and the next trip I took was I drove out to California with a friend just for fun and I ran into a group there that had the best cocaine I ever did. I've only been doing cocaine for a couple years but this is about 1975 so about four years I had been
doing cocaine in the area and dealing with it the best I could as a small time because I was at the bottom of the chain instead of the top of the chain. Right. And so I went out to LA and I found this cocaine that I never, it was just really good. So came back home. I started dating a girl that her mom owned a head shop. Her brother was one of the, probably the second biggest bookie in the area. And I became friends. I mean, some of these, uh,
Some of the guys like bookies and everything back then were just characters, just fun to be around and just attracted everybody. They were the life of the party kind of people. And I borrowed $8,000 from him. I said, listen, I was selling him pot. He loved to smoke pot. So I took that $8,000, got on a plane, went to San Francisco, and
My buddy that I went with, you know, they started, oh, we got the cocaine, but we ran out of that. And then we went on this trail all around town and never could get a sample. And then they waited until we were just getting ready to get on the airplane. They said, oh, we found it. So we got it. Wasn't even able to try it or anything. And, you know, put it, we had a banjo. We put it in the back of the banjo, put it on the plane, came home and got ripped off. You know, it was garbage.
And that was my big lesson. I thought, oh man, these guys are going to shoot me. I'm not going to have the money to pay them. I think I got back $2,000 out of some bogus cocaine that I tried to sell. So that was my second big lesson.
What kind of money were you making in general? That was really support and habit right then. That wasn't the money. If you want me to keep telling you the process, then I've met a guy in Bethesda about 50 miles out of town in Front Royal. I went out there and he was getting cocaine from Bolivia. He had a
a way that they were sending it to him in the mail. And that's where I really learned what quality was. And that was another big lesson, you know, with Dale and the people who were around, how people really abused the power of having drugs and manipulating people around. And then the girls got involved with some of the Redskins. That was another
mafia group that was not as big as they thought they were, but that was really a football team. That's what I thought, but then you said kind of a mafia. Well, it was who was around some of the guys that played, you know, and that's where I got my taste of what that was. And then how the girl, what my girlfriend that I used to have a girlfriend,
That we stayed friends, she became friends, or supposedly getting married with one of the Redskins. They had a kid and that was another whole process of learning the manipulation and how people use people when they have drugs. So that was kind of hard because of how they treated women. I don't know if people know the other side of the sports and how women get treated, but it's pretty
It's pretty, I don't know how you want to put it, egregious. Yeah. Yeah. So that really stunned me. And so, so I learned a little bit from this guy in front Royal and then we had the Redskins and then there was a lady, a friend of mine that the guy that turned me on to cocaine, you know, his brother had a maid from Bolivia.
And then I got
Through the traumatic experience when I went out to Virginia, my girlfriend started sleeping with this guy that had the best cocaine and that just tore me up. With that pressure and what I've been through and the police kind of starting to watch me, I had a nervous breakdown. My reality was so far out there, I could not even function and got put in a psych ward.
So I was in a psych ward in 1976 and that was, you know, how could I fit in the world and, you know, what was life about? You know, what does this all mean? You know, trying to figure my purpose out. I was just going to say you didn't really have a purpose.
Yeah, I was just kind of existing. Yeah. Yeah, you know, but I knew there was something, you know, my grandfather, you know, how can I make this be something that I really enjoyed? What was this about? What was my niche in all this? And I didn't want to be used and underneath these guys that had the families and how they were abusing people, you know, so I thought I could do it better than them. Right. And, you know, and that that that experience came back out. I was there for
two weeks. Where? In Springfield State Hospital. Oh, okay. You know, and then I said, tried to get a job. You know, I said, okay, I'm going to quit dealing. My dad drove me, I was up near BWI airport in Baltimore. He drove me to a job interview and I walked in this building and they gave me some papers, this fill out, and I couldn't even write down my name and address and what I could do. And I kind of folded the papers up, sit them on the table and walked out.
And I said, okay, I know what I got to do. You jumped on a plane to Bolivia? Well, now it's coming. I was, but yeah, that was the start of just feeling that I didn't fit. You know, just couldn't adjust with the pain and the things I was traveling with in my life. It's just a ball of confusion. And where could I get my spot, if you want to call it, that I was going to be successful?
So, but that was the start of where it ended up. So the guy that turned me on to cocaine and we did some business. So as this was going on, I was building my little empire of understanding how to function among all the criminals. I was a criminal too, but you know, I didn't look at myself as a criminal, but I was too.
And so I got that connection and this girl, finally he convinced his brother to give us her telephone number. She was from Bolivia. So she called up one night. She says, okay, this is me and my buddy. I'm going to meet you in Georgetown. And she gave us an address and it was an alley. And it was about 12 o'clock at night. And I didn't know if this was the final hit. They finally set me up.
And because you never know who's doing what in the world. And so we drove down to, that was about an hour's drive from where we lived, drove down, parked and was walking in this alley and there was a beautiful Bolivian, looked like a model.
And I said, okay, this has got to be a setup. This can't be real. And she broke an English, beautiful accent. You know, you would dream about meeting somebody like this. And she gave me a bag and she says, okay, this is what you're going to do. You sell this, I'm going to meet you back in two weeks. You guys give me the money. So that's how it started. And I think we got, when we first started, it was just about five ounces, not a bunch.
But I hustled, got the money, gave her the money. So I did work with her for about five years.
And then her boss... That same process? Yeah, same process. Well, it would be meeting different places. I met her in front of the airport. She'd walk out of the airport. I had a Doverman. I had a van, a big tank of water. Driving up to the airport is not the smart thing to do because, you know, you never want to get blocked in. You're a drug dealer. You learn how to do things a little safe. But she had the boldness. It's like she had a license to do what she did. She walked out of the airport.
got in the van, gave us, I think, a pound, a pound, that's how we started, and got back out and she said, I'll see you in about a month. A pound of what? Cocaine. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, when I say cocaine, it was as good as you could imagine. They don't, anything that goes through the mob and came in, nothing was like this.
It was, I think they charged me like a thousand dollars an ounce and the market for that without cutting it was about two thousand at that time. And then if you cut it a little bit, which I was very, I wanted to build a market. I wanted the best in town and that's where I started my market.
If I was going to build what I was trying to build, I needed the best product. And so I've been, what, almost five years of getting a bunch of garbage, and once in a while you get something that was good. But that's where I could build what I was trying to build. So what kind of money are you still making now? Are you doing decent? Yeah, I was making, I would say, we would make
between $15,000 and $20,000. At that time, it was a pretty good market, and it would take me a week to do that. And then her boss understood, so my reputation started traveling back in Bolivia. We got a guy in the United States that he pays, and we trust him. And then her boss
Are you are I mean, I mean, before we get to that, like, are you are people around you getting busted or anything? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, in the meantime, when she wasn't around, because that would land, there was no I had no idea when she was coming and when she wasn't coming. And there was times when it would be three or four months that she wouldn't disappear. I had no telephone number. The only thing she had was my number. Right. I had no control of when she would show up.
So in the meantime, I said, well, I got to do something. I got tired of waiting. And then I wanted to go down to Florida, because that's where the action was. And my uncle was a bartender. And he was kind of the guy that was my idol when I grew up. He had a brand new Cadillac every year come down, had the trunk full of Playboys, lifted weights, had a tattoo, the model. That's who I modeled myself. My father and I didn't get along.
Family stuff was a mess. That was the guy that showed me how to work on engines. He was like the king for me. He was a bartender down there. He was an alcoholic. He and Barry, which I mentioned to you, they were buddies. They went treasure hunting in South America. They were the real deal.
My uncle had been arrested in South America for gun smuggling. So that's what he did when they were all mixed with guns. They were the old time guys. Barry and this CIA agent that we'll get to later in the story used to be Dean Martins and Frank Sinatra's captain on their boat. So the guy Barry, which I'll share more about, he and I became friends.
and uh he didn't use coke he was a drinker but he could speak spanish so i needed a translator to get to this next step that i was about ready to take so i started uh dealing a little bit of drugs for the cocaine cowboys that was in fort lauderdale so i went down there and he introduced me to them and they took me under their wing they liked me
you know, gave me a car when I came down there. It was pretty, pretty wild. They were really wild, but they will, they, they were the kind of guys that would use you and then set you up. So when they get in trouble, that's how they kept their market going. They would build a clientele and then they would set people up and the people that were working with them would let them continue to deal. So there was some big lawyers involved, the big money, real big money.
So the big money, the money that I started making, started when I got in touch with that gentleman, I gave you that picture. Right. This is Barry Seale, the movie. Yeah. American Made. American Made, the guy that they made that movie about Barry, one of the guys, and I met the pilots.
from Barry. They were, I mentioned that CIA airport, that was all set up by the CIA and they let them use the airport. And then when they decided to close them, I guess they were, as they did that, the CIA, they were setting up, they were infiltrating all the market that they wanted to. So when they got finished with them, they arrested them all. This is the real story. And then they had a judge, I think it was North Carolina, South Carolina,
They had a judge, so Barry and his partner, the pilots all went to prison. I think they got like five years in the movie. And then Barry and his partner, they made them get all the money and they came in the courtroom. Barry told me, he says, we had garbage, you know, trash bags full of money and the judge made them give them all the money and send them out.
So it was all about the money sifting and getting into right hands. You know, we know what we know about that. I was going to say, yeah, I had seen the movie when they made it back in the 80s. It was on like HBO. And this was when, who was that? I forget the guy like Tom Cruise played the remake, but I forget Dennis Hopper. Oh, really? I didn't. He played Barry Sale. OK. And I always remember
you know the end of that movie where they sent him where the they sentenced him to the halfway house like you have you can you can work but you have to be at the halfway house every night and he said he says in that one he says to the judge what are you talking about like if you make me go to the you're just they'll just kill me in the halfway house and he's doing the judges like get out of here you're fine you're getting a deal and sure enough they they kill him in the halfway house yeah pulls up and they're waiting for him yeah um
So at what point do you end up going to, do you start importing stuff from? Well, so as I was working with Barry and getting this experience and
I'm trying to think of when the law, of course, I was best friends with a guy in D.C. that was like a mafia family. He had a strip club and different clubs. He was my grandfather and his father were friends. So the people I was around and my record in the DEA and
were right close and now Barry and the guy that set up Barry, which we found out was the old guy from the captain when they used to captain Frank Sinatra's boat. He was in the CIA and at that time I didn't know what his part was. And so we needed somebody to fly a shipment to from Florida to me and they used him to do that. And then right before he flew back,
They told me that he just busted, I think it was a plane from Columbia. There must have been a ton of cocaine. And he was the guy that they used. And we didn't know it at the time, but we'd already set up him flying cocaine to me. I mean, the CIA, they work inside. I mean, this is, they have a cover that lasts for years. And so I have a guy coming to Maryland from, Barry's sending him
bringing a shipment from the cocaine cowboys and he's a CIA agent. And here I am, you know, he, they kind of knew I was working with this Bolivian group and my boss was best friends with the guy in Noriega. And that's when they were trying to get the evidence for Noriega and before they were setting him up.
So I couldn't tell who I was with when when this thing started rolling with my new boss, the guy that came from Bolivia. When it came in, it went to the police in Miami. I would go down with Barry and they would give it to Barry to give to me. So it got so difficult to know who side I was really on. And that's kind of where I was at with starting my
My relationship with the guy in Bolivia and that's does that makes is it making sense? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I was thinking about, um, I was just wondering to myself, uh, when we said Noriega, I was wondering if Colby knew who Manuel Noriega was. Well, he was, uh, a pan, it was a Panama, right? Yeah, it was Panama. He was the president. Yeah. Yeah. That was when the big cartel was really had control of the money.
the people that were really involved were him and some people, you know, it was a select few that was friends with him that were covered
in many ways. They wanted me to meet him, but I was afraid to, and Barry met him in Miami. They were pulling me even closer, and I said, nope, I'm not going to get that close. So, I mean, this is the president of Panama, you know, the Panama Canal, Panama, like in Central America, and he's running
He's running drugs. He's letting drugs get run through the company and eventually they're selling drugs to get money to buy arms for the Contras.
a militant group that was trying to overthrow. What were they trying to overthrow? Was it Colombia? I don't know if it was one of those countries then, I don't know the whole detail. So they're trying to overthrow like a communist regime or something in there, you know. I mean it was a complete clusterfuck, like it was just completely just, but
The CIA is actively working with them to get the money because Congress, they couldn't get money from Congress to fund these guys for this revolution. So what do they do? They start working with these guys in Panama and letting them, and selling drugs, letting the drugs go in and out to get the money to buy the guns. And it's just, it's just, it's ridiculous. But this is like the president of a country and one of our allies. And then Reagan,
Sends in troops to arrest Noriega. Yeah, like because I mean, how do you say? Hey, you've been indicted like it's like saying it's like saying gg ping has been indicted We need you guys to hand them over That's not gonna happen. So they send in American troops to a ref and there's a huge gun battle I mean this goes on like all like like a day or two. Yeah, this is yeah, I
I think it got too close to getting the truth out and what was really going on and they shut it down. Then Ronald Reagan gets pulled in front of Congress and he can't remember nothing. I think he had about 30 different ways to say, I don't recall.
You know, at this time, I don't presently recall what happened. You know, I'm not sure. I would have to check with my so-and-so. At that time, I believe that I cannot recall exactly what happened. I mean, it was, it was like, this is amazing. It was like watching Bill Clinton give those answers. It's like, did he just, like, how are your sides, like, you're a professional sidestepper. Like, it almost, I almost feel like you answered the question. You didn't, but I almost feel like you did. You're so good at it.
And that was the Iran-Contra whole affair, but it was all these guys were just involved and the government's involved and that's, it's kind of like the
Fast and furious where they're they're they're pulling guns, you know from drug dealers and selling them to the to the cartel like it's it's insane It's a what are you doing? This is the DEA ATF and DEA, you know that are involved in this like that You're not supposed to be doing those things. Yeah, they did some stuff that they don't not supposed to do They don't do listen they don't do nearly as good of a job in
The Tom Cruise one? I didn't see the first one. The first one is better because you have a full understanding that like this is clearly, this is what's happening. It's hard to follow in the Tom Cruise one. It's more flash and... But it was a good movie. Yeah, these guys are, you know, all these people are really unique and individuals. I mean, you know, they just chose this other side of the street.
So it's, it's funny, you don't, you never really get like a, a super average normal guy, you know, in like the drug criminals are extreme personalities. Yes, you're right. Yeah. They're either there's so much talent sitting behind bars. It's amazing how to say that, you know, if they could ever understand how to find the life that they could be successful with, like you have been, and, um,
I'll tell a little bit more about where I came, but there's a ton of talent sitting behind bars. Sad. So at some point you say, hey, I'm just going to start shipping this stuff in from Bolivia. So then I started working with my boss. They brought me down to Bolivia, invited me to come visit.
You know, at that time, you know, I was a pretty business type guy, you know, silk suits and, you know, I enjoyed having money. And, you know, I guess at that time, I guess a big shipment was about 10 keys for me. And, you know, my habit was way, way, I was drinking about a fifth of what's
What's my drink with the blue case? Crown Royale. Crown Royale. It's been 37 years since, but I was probably drinking a fifth of Crown Royale almost a day.
and smoking pot and getting high, you know, because I had the DEA, the FBI, and the CIA all around what I was doing. And I got pulled out of the airport. That shipment that that CIA guy brought, I left Florida and stuck about a gram in my pocket because I knew I was being watched. I wouldn't travel. I was smart enough not to travel and move it myself because that's when
You know, I didn't want to jeopardize. I knew I was being watched and they pulled me out. And that was Ronald Reagan Airport. I walked outside, was getting in the cabin, a lady looked like a grandmother, flipped the badge, DEA. She said, son, come on, we're going to talk to you. You know, pulled me out of there, took me down in a basement. And, you know, I was making excuses. All my uncles are an alcoholic and I had to go to Florida to help them.
And they went through my collar and I've had some real thick socks on. And I had a gram in there and they went down my legs and missed it. And I was sweating. But that really, you know, and then I knew that was the day before the guy from the CIA was shipping, coming, flying in. And I think they thought they had me and they didn't and they didn't blow his cover.
And I had like three or four different places in Maryland. One was in Annapolis. I had different places. I was hiding everything, you know, and moving it around because that was the only thing I knew is to stay ahead of everybody. So that was
That was the start and then after that, then we started, I got invited down to, got through that and that was with Cocaine Cowboys. I was doing a little bit with the Cuban mafia in the Keys. They were big pot smugglers and that was real bad cocaine. I worked with them for a while and that wasn't
That wasn't good because you get a batch and then you'd have a hard time selling it and then they would be back up in Maryland kind of threatening me, you know, what are you going to do? And I had to, I did some of the money. They had shipped something in that they smuggled it in diesel and it smelled like it was horrible. So anyway, I lost money on that and I gave them a sports car I had built to pay them off, to make them happy.
and then going to Bolivia with my boss. I would die before I would tell on them. It was family. They trusted me. You go through a life of drug and then you get to a place that people really cared and trusted you. Even when I got arrested, they tried to get me to set them up.
I didn't. I said, you know, if I did the crime, I was going to do the time. And that's another part of the story that's coming up, getting pulled over. But so let me take the story this way. So I was at the edge, you know, my boss was in New York and he got pulled over. This is right before Noriega got arrested.
And I believe he was used by our government to get what they needed to set up the, uh, the invasion that they had for him. And I was just on the outside of that. And, and, um, I think I was watched as I was dealing and they were using it also to kind of corner him, but for somehow I did not get arrested. It was beyond my understanding that what I was doing, I didn't get stopped. And, and, but,
You know, so I tried to, when he got, when there was about six months where I couldn't get in touch with him and I said, I got to get out or I know I'm going to do big time. I know I'm going to be dead or I'm going to do big time. So I said, I'm going to open a recording studio. And in the recording studio, I said, well, this is one way I'll be able to support my habit and not have to deal because, you know, I was,
I had a huge monster habit of cocaine. You get used to spending money and it's hard not to change unless you change your whole life. It's hard to get out of whatever you're doing when you get used to money. You probably know that better than I do. So I opened up a recording. I took the money. The last trip I had about 20 ounces and about
$40,000 and I said okay I'm gonna take that aside I'm gonna build a recording studio and I'm gonna somehow get a hit record because I said this is the only way I'm ever gonna get out. So another friend that I'm still friends with you know had a piece of property my father left my family left and I was trying to buy it from them had a garage that I used to have a carpet company when I was
I remodeled that building and built a recording studio. So in about a year after I got it all put together, it was almost like I was blessed for somehow
And I was kind of on the side of demonic side or Satan's world. I'm just going to give this in spiritual terms. I was kind of able to move in darkness without anybody stopping me.
You know the blessings I call them worldly blessings of you know meeting that girl and how I Didn't get in trouble. I didn't get shy. I mean my friends were getting shot. I was in I was in some rough places in DC. I mean I had no fear I don't know what you know what protected me, but anyway got through all that And this recording studio so I was this guy that had done three albums with Warner Brothers and
Unbelievable. I'm not going to mention his name because he still has the company. He's still doing his thing. But he was a cult. He had six wives and 21 kids at the time. He was my age. How old was I? I was 33 years old.
and Warner Brothers blackballed him. He had articles in Playboy and unbelievable Stevie Wonder, James Brown type of charisma, just an unbelievable magnetic man, a black man that
had all the talent in the world, but the industry was scared of him because of what he believed in and they shut him down. And he was looking for a guy that had a studio and money. And of course it was me. So when we got together, it was like, we fit like a glove. You know, it was like, uh, I wanted to be successful to, to continue my lifestyle. And he needed somebody like me to back him that wasn't afraid of the industry or, you know, so we started an album, um,
And that album took us about two years. And I was at that time, I had no understanding of what it took to produce a hit record. So he taught me. And I mean, it was drooling the time we spent in the studio and what he did with all the musicians. I mean, oh, I mean, when you say cutting a groove years ago, when they cut a groove, they worked until they couldn't stand and produce something unbelievable. It's not like today is a little different when you produce stuff.
That was a different era that used to do it on the two inch tape, you know, it wasn't done with the computer agents. It was like used to have to bounce tracks. And so I really got broken into the music industry and learning how to do that. But when you get into a call, there's a spiritual force that we all are in and understanding that is where this what God or what what my life has helped me understand is
You know, we all have gifts. You know, I have a gift that I used for my own success as a drug dealer and just all the pain and things that I lived in, I didn't know I didn't have to. So, you know, I'm in this time with this cult and I had a girlfriend.
that was a real hippie. Back then, we were hippies. Hippies are drug dealers, one or the other, and I was a drug dealer. So after two years, I ran out of money. And, you know, my family, the boss's wife called me because he was not able to move anymore. And she said, you want to come down to Miami? I got I got and I wasn't trying. I was trying not to go anymore. I was trying not to be involved.
and Barry, which was my driver, was he was in Columbia. He'd spent a lot of time in Columbia. And so I would had to go get it. And, you know, I had long hair, you know, it was like a rock, you know, kind of rock star, you know, velvet sports jacket, top hat, you know, you know, very exotic kind of person at the time. You stuck out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And not afraid to. And that was very,
a side of my personality that I'm kind of glad that's not there anymore because it wasn't balanced with, you know, being socially acceptable. Right. I'm going to say that I'm sure the Coke helped. Well, it did. It did. It certainly gave me that euphoric that is not grounded for reality. I'll put it that way. That confidence to stand out and not be self
concerned at all. Yeah, I get it. So, did you go down there? What happened? Well, so, right before I left and, you know, I was trying to decide what side of my own am I going to try to be on a side of life that was, how would I say,
appreciated people in a different way that you are when you do when you're a rock star and that how how the sex industry and how the music is promoted and how dramatic and how many people get hurt along the way and how people get used and abused and and i had to make a decision am i going to be over here with with him and go for this thing you know we had a song called universal party and
It's a piece that could move a lot of people in a direction. Am I going to be on this dark side and be a drug dealer? What is my life all about? Why did God or whatever power let me get this far? I was trying to figure out, being in a psych ward and all the things I experienced, the pain I was still carrying, what does it all mean? We all get to this point in life.
Right before I left, I prayed, first time I ever prayed to God. I said, God, I said, I can't stop something. I said, I can't stop. I can't, I gotta quit this. I was such, you know, I had a deviated septum. I couldn't hardly drink anymore. You know, I was, couldn't hardly do. Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store
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the insanity of that life. And I had to make a decision, am I going to stay here? And I prayed to God, I said, if you stop me, I'll turn my life over to you. So I went down to Miami and met his wife and they had all the mules. They had probably six to eight people that they would pack up. When you left Bolivia, they had a room you went through. And they asked me when I was in Bolivia,
they would pay that lady to get you to through to Miami and then when you went to customs they already had that set up who was going through so they that's how that's how it works and then the government get paid everybody is paid but they they got that group through and met me and you know the people got a room I got a room and then all the mules came to the room and unloaded their stuff it was all wrapped in bags and crust and they had it on them all different ways and so I left
Miami coming back and you know it was a out of all the years I ever did cocaine that was the best batch the last batch was the best batch and so I got out of Miami and came to got in Woodbine which is the first right in Georgia got over the line and by three o'clock in the morning you know I had a Cadillac hat on you know all that got pulled over and and my girlfriend was with me
And they put me in the back of that police car and I said, I'm yours. So that was my surrender. Why did they pull you over? I think, I don't know who set me up. I don't know if it was, I met the guy from Cuba down there. I don't know if the sheriff would never tell me. We're still friends. I talked to him a month ago. He won't tell me.
He won't tell me. He's ex-FBI. He was the FBI agent for, like, he worked under J. Edgar Hoover. He worked for, I think, 15 years before he came sheriff. I mean, he had some power in that town. And so somebody gave him the, what, just somebody said, pull this car out or search the car. Well, in Woodbine, Georgia, it was the first state, first town out. He had, that was where they would set people up
coming out of Florida. That was the FBI connection and all the snitches and all that stuff. That was the town you got pulled over. So there was 10 other people in there from coming that way. That was cocaine corridor. And so I got pulled over, popped the trunk. I was had it hid behind where the
The spare tire was, there was a compartment I had it in there and it was the back of the car, I said, I'm yours. So that's where my new life really started. I had a choice. I could do it. I could stay in that confusion or I said, okay, if this is what you're going to do, I'm yours. So it was the first week I was there, the GBI in Georgia came to me and said, okay, you're going to do some big times, you know, and
I wasn't, and they said, we're going to put you out on 95 and you call your people and tell them you broke down and you've got to come.
And I wasn't, I didn't cooperate with them. I was still kind of out of my mind, you know, I was kind of out there, to tell you the truth. I was very, very, you know, you do that much drugs and you're that high for so long, your, your, your reality thinking isn't too good. So, you know, I was still a rock star. I was still a rock star back then, you know, but I knew I had to make a change. You know, I had to, I had to, uh,
And so that's where this crazy new part of my life started. And so the GBI came and they didn't. And then I got a lawyer and my girlfriend wanted to, they arrested her. And I said, the only way I can get her out, everybody there got arrested with the girlfriend and the guys all blame the girlfriend. So none of them were guilty. None of them were guilty. You found what in the car? Baby, what did you have in the car? They were all,
So they had they had a you know, the sheriff was he had a hit on him. He was resting he confiscated When I was there 18 million dollars off the 95 Wow and he started and now this is a little further down But he started getting people going to Florida so they had all the informants in the towns telling them what was coming and he started
getting the money before it went to Florida instead of after. Right. And that's a whole nother little piece of the story. Which is really the way they would prefer it. Well, not the judges and lawyers. No. But yeah, that's where this thing gets real crazy. But so with interstate transportation, I got charged with, I got 35 years. That's what they gave me.
In Georgia? Well, it was interstate transportation, but I got arrested in Georgia. Right, okay. So it was federal? Federal, yeah. So, you know, it was about three months, and I had three months before my court, before they took me into court, and got a lawyer, and they pleaded for aid. But before that, I had to sign the papers saying I was guilty to get my girlfriend out. And I was trying to save my house, trying to save the recording studio.
And so she went back and I signed papers. I said, I'm guilty. I'm not going to. So on the way back from court and I had spaghetti legs, you know, that was before I pleaded. They gave me 35 and I could hardly walk up at the courthouse is 100 yards from the jail.
And I was walking back there and I said, man, what did I do? I did it. You know, what's going to happen to me? You know, I got 35 years and my parents, my mother wouldn't even talk to me. Nobody's going to, they'd say, oh, it's good for you to be in jail. Cause I drove everybody, you know, I was insane and the family suffered. The family suffers through our insanity. And so they, my sister, it's the best thing in the world for him. He'll finally get his life back.
But anyway, walking back to the jail, there's a little area when you walk into the jail house, and it was a brand new jail because the sheriff had built the courthouse, he built the new jail with money he was taking off in 95. And the sheriff came, unbelievable character.
He had a big draw accent. He said, but my girlfriend pleaded that he would talk to me after court. So she gave him a flower, put a card on it. So after jail, he said, okay, I'll talk to him when he gets after court. So he pulled me in his office and he says, son, are you guilty? I said, yes, sir. He says, you know, you're the first guilty person's ever been in my jail.
And that's how our friendship started. And they had a says, listen, I might be able to get you a little better on your parole. We're doing a thing saying say no to drugs. And that was Ronnie Reagan's right.
And I said, yes, sir. Oh, so you were under the old law. This was before 1986, right? It was actually 1980, the beginning. That's when I got arrested in 86. Okay. So were you under the old law? I don't know. I don't know what was there was parole. Parole was an option. Like you would, you could get parole. You could get parole. Okay. Well, you know, they were still paroling, you know, but, um,
You know, I had two and a half keys in the trunk when I got pulled over. So I said I'm guilty and then they gave me the 35 year sentence.
But when I told him that, yeah, I was guilty, he says, listen, I'm going to let you do some testimonies with me. It's election year, and I need somebody to go out and explain what it is to go through your drug addiction and stuff. So I said, thank you, Lord. I didn't know the Lord then. I didn't know anything about God. Right. But I did surrender to him. And that was my first hope. That was something, you know, I was like,
crushed with that 35 year sentence. And then that gave me a little hope that somebody, something possibly could, you know, this guy's going to let me work with him. So the first time I did a testimony for him was in a grade school and that's what I have these shackles
These are my shackles from that time I did that. I always like to pull them out because it kind of, I remember what life was back then. And this was, I was, you know, shackled legs, arms, hands, and then that was putting me in front of a grade school and it really let me see of the bondage I was in. You know, we look at the physical but the spiritual is where the bondage is. Nobody's, you know, we're all
You know, what is freedom? And so this is really my first step in that right, that direction. But like I said, when I do share about my life as what happened, I bring those out and really helps me to connect. That's who I used to be, bound and not free and not ashamed to who I was. I'm not ashamed anymore. Right. You know, I'm an ex-con. I know it. But God is doing something with my life.
You know, so that's where it started. And then, you know, I was out doing a talk with him and he was in a suit and he rubbed against the chalkboard. And when I was walking out with him, I grabbed his arm and I, you know, you don't touch anybody like that. And I rubbed off the chalk that was on his suit. And that's where our bond, our friendship really started. And he started trusting me.
Then it's amazing thing happened. I got a, I became a trustee in the kitchen. That was a big step getting from, from yellow, uh, from, from the orange shoots into the white suits. And I had a privilege to going down. And so I did flooring. So I said, you know, uh, they just did a brand new kitchen and they had no flooring in it. And I said, well, let me do, let me put some flooring in here for you guys. So I ordered some flooring from Maryland. They shipped it down. I put the flooring in.
And I just built cabinets for the library in the jail. And then he started picking me up and I started going with him. So what was illegal? When he picked me up, he took me to Charleston. That's where his family lived.
It was against the law to go out of state. I'd say it now, but I wouldn't. So he would take me there. I would drive it. He couldn't drive good. So he had a bad hip. He needed a hip replacement and I would drive him and we became best friends. I started, I probably went, I was out of the jail probably three or four days a week riding around with him. He took me fish. He took me everywhere. I mean, it was just like insanity. And that was, uh,
And then after I probably did 15 testimonies in little churches, community groups, and just telling them what was going on and what started going to church. And I didn't, like I said, I didn't know God, but everybody, there is a God, if you don't believe or not, but there is, and I've learned the difference between the dark and the light. So that's where God is using me. I understand what that is. I lived in it.
And I started walking a new way. Now, did my drug habit, I hadn't gotten out of jail yet, but my drug habit was did I smoke pot in jail? You know, I tried to get people to send me stuff. The cravings I had just didn't disappear, you know, of my lifestyle.
but I wanted to do the right thing. So after doing those testimonies and I said, I said, can you guys get me out of here? The guy that started taking me to church, his uncle was Jim Proctor. He's the sheriff of Woodbine, Georgia right now. So he was the guy that I started communication with. He took me to church with him, his family, and they kind of, his mom on Christmas brought me to his house.
They gave me Christmas presents. I was in the kitchen making gravy with his mom. I found out they didn't judge me. That was where I found out, I'll just say, God's love. They loved me like nobody ever did, and it gave me faith that there's hope for me.
And that's where my life really started, just from that experience of people that showed me that I had value and stopped judging me because of what I did and gave me a chance to be a new person. And that's where my walk really started. So his uncle was the judge. The Bill Smith and him went to his uncle and said, can we get you out of here? In 18 months I was out.
The state penitentiary tried to take me to prison. The sheriff said, I'm not going to let them take you out. You're in the drug program. The sheriff is running a drug program for the feds?
Oh, okay. So that was a big thing. You know, he got in touch later with Janet Reno. It went right up to the, that was Bill Clinton's person we started. Yeah, yeah, she was the U.S. Attorney for Bill Clinton. Yeah, after I got out, I went back to Woodbine and worked with about 12 churches and the jail, started going to the jail ministry there. And he got permission, he spent almost $400,000
to send people to go to Saddleback Church to get recovery ministry leaders. So that was my first big step. So how much time did you spend in prison? 18 months. 18 months on a 36-year sentence? 35 years. 35-year sentence. That's insane. What can I say?
You know, I've seen people for a couple of grams. Yeah. To five years. I was going to say, I've seen guys, you know, they'll bring a gun to a $10 crack deal and get 15 years, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's pretty unbelievable. Yeah. I was going to say, did you, were you on parole? I was on parole. Okay. And when I got out, I got my girlfriend, I went back to Georgia. I still wasn't talking to anybody in my family.
And I got married, the sheriff gave my wife to me and the guard gave my wife. It was a little town. You can imagine this is pretty wild. And that's where, you know, because I kind of disconnected from my family because I didn't know how to deal with that. My mother's still an alcoholic.
I was the bad guy. It took me two years to see if this was a real deal. Nobody trusted me for the first two years. All the guys were waiting for me to come out of retirement and go back to the old life. So what did you do when you got out? I got a job with a neighbor for $8 an hour as a laborer in a construction company.
And I was the happiest. I'm used to walking around with a briefcase full of money. Right. But I was I was had no worries. I didn't have that ton of bricks on my back. And I wasn't going to you know, that was what I did. And, you know, I did you read after I got married, I went back down to Florida. I had Barry. I sent some product down to Barry because I had another place in Fort Lauderdale that I still had a little hideout. And I sent some product down there
And I said, oh, I'm going to get high one more time. And I got high. And I realized I'm not that person anymore. And I was miserable. And I said, I'll never go back. And that was the turning point that this new person I was becoming was real. And I wanted God to use me in a new way. I found some peace that I never had and all the pain and abuse and all that.
You know, that wasn't part of my life anymore. So that's where it started. And then came back, got a job working in a flooring company. After I did construction, the guy that sent me that tile that I did the jail, I did flooring for a little bit before I got, I was dealing, but I still had a job at a flooring company called Horizon Floors.
And I was still dealing with drugs and rugs at that time. But went back and he had a big company, a Jewish man that was really a mentor kind of teaching me business and learning how to do business to be successful in the system instead of the way I was. You know, I had a talent, but I wasn't doing it legally.
So I did that for about three years and he wanted me to come on staff and salary. And, you know, I didn't, I was 26,000 in debt. The house I had had, you know, that drywall fell, had holes in the roof and, you know, just building my trust up with my family. It took about two years and then I became the walking miracle.
And my mom worked out a deal that I could have the property because I was the youngest and my sisters had moved. And that would be an inheritance that she gave my sister so much. And then that would be my inheritance. So I had a piece of property, just did two years with Burt. And I said, well, I'm going to open my own flooring company. So I paid off all my debt. I paid my mom the $26,000 and then had nobody after me.
and then I got involved in a little flooring company and I saved up $26,000. I went to the bank and asked them to match it. One of the jobs I got, another Jewish friend of mine was going to do a big project, 126 town homes, and he awarded me the job. So I went to the bank, borrowed money,
And that was the start of Craftmaster Interiors. So me and my wife started that company. I had this piece of property. It was four acres. We started working on subdividing that. And then we opened up a company in DC. I had Craftmasters of DC and Craftmasters of Maryland. That went on for 18 years or 10 years. And then she got in an accident.
She gave her life to the Lord, but she didn't quit using. She started drinking and got in a car accident and started doing Oxycontin. That was the real turning point of her downfall.
She had a lot of resentments of family. She had a rough abuse of things when she was young and could never forgive the people and all that that went through it. Her drug addiction got hard. It was the roughest. We were married 18 years. That was the roughest. I wouldn't give up on her, but it was the roughest thing. She's a brilliant business person. Like I said, we had the two companies. The right
As she got that accident and we started really having problems and she was overdosing. I was running into the hospital about every three months. You know, it was just, it was, you know, it's kind of what I put everybody through. Now I was trying to, I had to go through that with her and I didn't give up on her, but she passed. After a big job in DC, we went on a cruise to St. Martin's and she passed away on a ship. She overdosed.
Her body just gave out. She died down in the sick bay. How long ago was this? That was 2009 she passed away. 2008 or 2009. I'm not sure exactly. I was doing a whole city block of buildings from Davis Construction. I was doing about a six million dollar job, had about 30 guys working.
pretty successful. She was doing all the taxes. I was still not learning how to read and write very good, so I was trusting her to do the business. But when she passed
You know, I continue, but I always had this vision. God really touched me about helping guys, especially incarceration guys, reentry. That's my heart. I mentioned that to you. You know, like I said, there's so many gifted guys in bars that if they don't get it, if they don't realize they got to get it right, they're always going to be there. Right. And you've taken what you've been through and use your personality and your gifts to do what you're doing now, which is unbelievable.
But for me, God said, I have tremendous blessing with the Lord, meaning he's let me develop a way to help men with addiction. I'm kind of getting ahead of myself. After she passed, I had the business and really felt God calling me to find a piece of property to open up a recovery center.
and so that's where my heart was and I gave really gave the company and put it in my secretary's hands and I had three people in the office and I hired a new tax accountant because you know I never filed anything my wife did it all and I was kind of scared it might fall apart so
I found a lady I was doing recovery with at a church, Celebrate Recovery at the time, and that's what the sheriff helped me do back in Woodbine, send everybody there. So I got involved with Chuck Colson and some very big ministries, but because of me being my ex-con, I really didn't get, they kind of shut the door on me, doors didn't open for me. It's like,
Unless you've been there, sometimes people don't understand what that's all about. It's kind of a good old boys club. It's like opening a halfway house. It's like federal judges. It's hard to open a halfway house. You would think that they'd want as many open as possible. When I did Celebrate Recovery, I went to a jail and I went every Saturday for eight years.
And really, you know, it broke my heart when a guy his time's up and I said, where are you going? He says, well, I'll be back here because this is where, you know, they get used to the system. Instead of learning, they can do it outside. And there's nobody. A lot of churches come in and tell them about God, but they they need an experience. They don't need somebody telling them they need to be shown this can be real. And that's really what God has done with my life is saying this can be real. You can get it right.
And it's a way that God has showed me that works. And so after being in there and working with guys for about eight years, just realized I had to do something to get them a place to come and have a chance to start over. And so it took me about 10 years to find a place. It was a God story of
of what that was. It was really hard to get the money, and so I sold everything I had. We got married again. Me and my wife sold everything we had. I had two houses. I had a couple Mercedes. She had a townhouse, and then I was searching for property, and we bought 16 acres in Woodbine, Maryland.
It used to be an old French restaurant and it was a sanitarium for that for women. It housed 26 women. And then somebody turned it into a French restaurant. On 16 acres? You don't need 16 acres for that. It's just a beautiful, it's just a really beautiful, it's in the countryside. It's really a beautiful piece of property and it was built in 1862.
I would say you could put all those two businesses on one acre so you just got a whole bunch of acreage also. Yeah and I was trying to get something not close to anybody because you know when you bring people in with addiction. Yeah of course the neighbors get upset. Everybody wants halfway houses and they want rehabilitation but they just don't want it in their neighborhood. Right. So anyway I did it very slowly and the first not even eight months
So the IRS calls me and I get one, when they shut one business countdown, it was 46,000. And I said, what, nobody, what are you doing? What are you doing? And I had a big tax firm, big money. I paid them a lot of money. And in a month's time I had $500,000 and I just spent every cent that I had on this property. And I said, oh my goodness, I'm going to lose everything. I thought everything was going to collapse.
I learned how to go through a really hard time. I fired the... So, the IRS showed up. For what reason? You hadn't been paid? It was a year. The girls in the office that I trusted and the new tax firm, they didn't give them all the information. I just did these big, huge projects and the money that I spent was money that should have been
spent for taxes and I didn't, nobody told me that's what it was and I was trusting the girls that my wife, my first wife taught and they were putting the letters and the stuff for the IRS in a pile and I didn't get it until I got pulled aside. So my office that I didn't run I thought was doing a good job got me and I spent the money I should have been spending on taxes. I sold a house, I thought this was all profit and
And I had this big firm that I hired to say, you make sure you do this tax work with them so I don't get in trouble. And they didn't do that either. So I had to work my way out of that 500,000. I still had the company open, the flooring company. But that was, in the Bible it says, you know, moving mountains, you know, God does move mountains because there's a reason he let me experience all this and he got me through that too.
I started working, got a couple jobs, and I fired the tax accountants, and I went right in with this little country accountant, and went and visited the IRS myself. I was kind of fearful, but I said, these guys are getting me in more trouble. I had a $50,000 bill from the tax company that I hired to keep me from paying taxes, and I said, I'm not going to do this. I'll just do it myself. So I worked through that, got all my bills paid.
Got that 500. I went and negotiated every bill. It probably came down to about 300, but I got it all done. Right. You negotiate with the IRS for the debt. Yeah. You're never getting the 500. You may get 300, but you'll never get five. Yeah. So that worked out. So that's been 12 years that I've got the property and building the ministry or second chance center.
And now I'm really at a point where, you know, I've been very under the radar with what we do and, you know, just trying to, I want to build a place for guys to learn trades. Also, I've got a construction company. I've got a culinary chef. I just remodeled a kitchen in the building so guys could learn culinary school.
and also a fire alarm company. I've got three ways to teach them a new trade if they want to learn a new trade and a new way to live. So that's taken 12 years to get it to where a guy could have a chance to have a new life and reentry. There's a Kairos ministry that goes into jails.
And they spend a weekend working with guys and they just, because of the pandemic, they haven't been letting them go back in. They're doing that and I'm going to work with them. I'm going to keep at least four beds open for guys that are in prison that really want it because everybody talks about it.
You know, you got to really want it to make it work. Well, how many guys do you have right now? Right now I've got 10 guys and it kind of alternates. Eight is what I'm capable because a couple of guys will leave or whatever. Right. And I'm rezoning to get hopefully 16 to 20 guys. That's the, I've rebuilt the property from A to Z. You know, right now that's what we're doing is rezoning. And I had to build kind of a following and right now we have,
about $95,000 a year from just people sending money in, because I haven't gotten paid for 12 years. My wife doesn't get paid. I just do this because of my heart. I'm not looking for money. I'm trying to build this for the next generation because things are getting tough out here. So right now we've got $95,000 a year to pay. I've got two young men. One of them has been through the program.
I've got to raise up about at least $150,000 a year in donations to meet the $400,000 a year bill at cost to keep the property open. Somehow God keeps sending people to help, and this connection of coming here to talk to you has been quite unique. Yeah, I was going to say the guy that contacted me had been through the program. He is a graduate, yeah.
Okay, so now you've
Are you you feel you good? I'm really good. I mean, I think, you know, and then, you know, the book we have and I've got another book I'm doing. Colby will put it in the description box. Right. So I think it's on Amazon. I think you can get it on Amazon if somebody wants it. Yeah. Like I said, working on everything's on Amazon. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a picture of my grandfather. That's the guy that OK. He was a pretty gangster guy.
I think last time I talked to him was about eight months ago and he has always been in touch. He's the sweetheart of a guy, just a sincere, a guy that would die for you. That was the guys that I worked with. That's a guy, Dale. My little family was a tough little family, you know. That's how I put around me to keep from
Making sure I didn't go down before I surrendered, if you want to call it that. Is there anything else that I, anything I didn't ask? I think that's, you know, I have an unbelievable wife now. It's been a huge part, you know. I'm a faith-based program.
I don't push anything on anybody. I respect other people, but it was my ticket to a new life. I know Jesus Christ. I'm not a preacher, but I know what He did for me and how my life changed.
I appreciate what God has done with you one way or the other. He's using you to help people and that's huge. That's a blessing. Are you good? Did I do okay? Yeah. I just wanted to make sure that I didn't miss anything. I think that's pretty much the layout. There's a lot of detail I didn't
Hey, I appreciate you guys watching the video. If you like the interview, do me a favor and hit the subscribe button. Hit the bell so you get notified of videos like this.
It started with a scream inside a quiet Maryland home.
A mother trying to protect the family dog and her son in the grip of a violent hallucinogenic rage. By the time it was over, she was dead, and he claimed LSD made him do it. His name, David Minor IV, and we talked to him. Listen to Invisible Choir every other week as we uncover the most haunting true crimes you've never heard of, available wherever you get your podcasts.
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"text": " Talkspace is the number one rated online therapy. They work with many insurance companies and most people with insurance pay zero dollars for therapy or psychiatry. You can change your provider for free. This helps you find the licensed therapist who fits your needs the best. Therapy can be costly, but part of the mission of Talkspace is to provide quality care that is accessible and affordable whether or not you are insured. Talkspace makes getting the help you need easy. Let me tell you more about why I love Talkspace."
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"text": " I learned that talking things out can change your whole life. When I finally opened up about my past, it helped me understand myself and make better choices. As a listener of this podcast, you'll get $80 off of your first month with Talkspace when you go to Talkspace.com slash podcast and enter promo code SPACE80. That's S-P-A-C-E 8-0. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com slash"
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"text": " Hi, I'm Jean Chatsky. You may know me as the host of the Her Money podcast or the financial editor of NBC's Today Show for 25 years."
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"text": " It started with a scream inside a quiet Maryland home."
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"text": " A mother trying to protect the family dog and her son in the grip of a violent hallucinogenic rage. By the time it was over, she was dead, and he claimed LSD made him do it. His name, David Minor IV, and we talked to him. Listen to Invisible Choir every other week as we uncover the most haunting true crimes you've never heard of, available wherever you get your podcasts."
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"text": " You learn how to be a good drug dealer by experience. Nobody can teach you. And it's quite thrilling. Every cell in your body is trying to understand and be calm. My reality was so far out there, I could not even function."
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"text": " and got put in a psych ward. I was shackled, legs, arms, hands, put me in front of a grade school and it really let me see of the bondage I was in. I knew I was being watched. I had the DEA, the FBI, and the CIA all around what I was doing. So my reputation started traveling back in Bolivia. We got a guy in the United States that"
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"text": " He pays and we trust him. He's like the president of a country and one of our allies. And then Reagan sends in troops to arrest Noriega. And there's a huge gun battle. I would die before I would tell on him. I didn't get in trouble. I didn't get shot. I mean, my friends were getting shot. I mean, I had no fear. Drove down the park and was walking in this alley and there was a beautiful Bolivian look like model."
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"text": " Hey, this is Matt Cox and I'm here with Joe Tarsik and we're going to be talking about his story"
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"text": " Can I say drug smuggler? Yeah, interstate transportation or narcotics is what I got arrested for. But yeah, drug smuggler. Yeah, all the above. OK, all right. Do you want to go with that? Is that good? OK, I was going to say I was going to redo it, but."
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"text": " Yeah, let's go with drug smuggler. Well, it's funny, you know, it's like people say, you know, oh, you were arrested for mortgage fraud. Now it's bank fraud. Like, you know, there is no mortgage fraud. So same thing. You're giving the technical name. Most people just say smuggler. I won. I appreciate you coming out, obviously. Let's let's just start at the beginning. Like, you know, where were you born? Your parents, brothers, sisters, anything like that? I was born in Washington, D.C. I have two older sisters. Dad was a military man."
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"text": " My mom was considered the debutante and we lived on 17th and Upshur Street in Washington D.C. until I was three. You know, dad in the military didn't have a lot of money. Then we moved to Silver Spring in Maryland. But, you know, coming from a house that had a maid was, my grandmother was one of the wealthiest"
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"text": " Ladies in Washington and her husband died when I think he was 33 and my mom and the family lived with my grandmother before we moved out to Silver Spring. How old were you? I was three years old when we moved to Silver Spring. But your father was still in the military? He was still in the military, didn't retire. He went on to, got out of the military, got a job."
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"text": " When we were in Silver Spring, the house cost them $15,000. At the end of a dirt road, they didn't have much money. He was trying to support the family with that military income, which didn't work. They were always fighting. It was only a two-bedroom house. My bedroom, I actually stayed in a crib."
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"text": " in my mother and dad's bedroom until I was almost six years old. My sisters lived in the other room in the house. Very poor house, very poor at that time. How many sisters? Two sisters. So it's you and two sisters. Yeah. My dad came from a very poor background. His father was from Russia. They lived in upper state New York, never had running water. His dad went back to Russia when he was 15 years old."
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"text": " He joined the Navy to take care of his three brothers and his mother. It was just a real bad scene. My grandfather could never speak English."
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"text": " Very he was from i was a russian cossack and very rough on my grandmother all the stories were that he used to beat her it was very dark if you want to call it dark so you went to high school yeah yeah let me go back and just talk about my grandmother's side you know uh and my my mother's side was very wealthy and it was like uh two two opposites my mother growing up very in very wealthy family because of my grandfather and we'll get"
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"text": " down the road a little bit more about him and then you know my father being very poor them trying to work together back in Maryland now and now we're I'm at three years old in Silver Spring Maryland and at about age I guess third grade is went to a little school right in that little neighborhood and that's when they realized I had a problem with reading and writing and that was when"
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"text": " really the challenges started in my life."
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"text": " You had some kind of a learning disability? Yeah, well, they call it dyslexia now. But back then there was no cure. Nobody knew. They thought there was something wrong. You know, the kid's a smart kid. Why can't he read and write? So that was kind of my... Same thing. He's got a good vocabulary. He communicates well. What's the problem? Yeah. When I was a kid, I could take an engine apart, put it back together, but I couldn't read and write. So something was off."
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"text": " But so that's kind of where it was when I was young. You know, mom and dad didn't get along and continue to fight. And one traumatic thing that happened when I was growing up, when my father kind of grew up in that same thing like his dad would yell and scream, you know, my mom would hold me when I was young when they would fight. So my father wouldn't hit her. So that's how I grew up for my first six years from age"
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"text": " really it started age three to age six. And then the, you know, we were kind of in like a farmland back then. It was not very built up. And, you know, I had nobody ever watching over me or, you know, when I went home, nobody said, help him with his homework. Nobody, it was kind of like I was on my own because of all their problems. And then at age seven, I got,"
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"text": " went out to a barn and was playing with the kids and some older kids came out and the first time I got molested by a young man and that was the reading and the molestation was a traumatic and the way I brought up was brought up you know with the yelling and screaming kind of turned me into a shell of a person and just not confident and really struggling just socially in school and"
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"text": " They sent me to a special school called Hillcrest in Washington. They had to borrow money from my grandmother and that was a big deal. It was an hour drive to the school and back home and that's when all the arguing really started with my mother and father. So that's where that out of line growing up and that's where that kind of led to."
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"text": " Did you graduate from that school? I graduated from that school and started learning more about my grandfather. As I was growing up, my family would really worship him. The money was still with my grandmother, even though it was years that he died."
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"text": " And that in the book that I gave you, there's a picture of the mansion he built on 16th Street. He was one of the richest men in D.C., but he started smuggling liquor from Canada when he was probably 20 years old. And his dad was the chief of police in Washington. So they were really they were the little mob in Washington. Right. And that was my grandmother had"
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"text": " four daughters and my mother was the first one to have a boy so they named me after my grandfather so who was Joseph Marr and I was the first Joseph boy so I was really looked at to kind of hold the torch you know in my mind I was grown up to be like him and so that's how this all started forming those years of resentment and heading towards the problems with the drugs and"
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"text": " How did you"
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"text": " like did the reading get better or did they just kind of it got worse and it didn't get any better i went to the special school and i they still passed me i went to another special school in Wheaton that's a little farther away about and supposedly i was making progress after the one in hill and in dc and then when i got to seventh grade my sisters all graduated my"
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"text": " One sister was a homecoming queen, very prominent in the school and the teachers seemed to like me, but I still got put in a special class. But in gym class, one of the football coaches recognized that I was pretty athletic. And so that was really my key to going through school without ever learning how to read and write. Right. So I ended up lettering nine times."
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"text": " football, wrestling, and track. I was athlete of the year in my senior class. They said I would be the most successful athlete. That was a big thing in me. I mean, I was a very introvert then. Of course, the girls and the attraction of sports led to a lot of fun. In my senior year, I started smoking pot, and that was really the doorway. Got a wrestling scholarship."
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"text": " to Montgomery College. They paid for my books. That was the first semester. My fear when I got up in the morning, I was so fearful of somebody calling on me and having to speak in front of anybody. It was like torment. After wrestling class or the season, I said,"
},
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"start_time": 783.131,
"text": " I can't do this. And so I was working as a plumber on the side, actually started that when I was 16, like a summer job to get ready for sports and it was hard work. And one of the guys in the neighborhood that"
},
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"start_time": 801.903,
"text": " I went to high school with a really cool guy. I had a brand new car, a black guy, Afro. I was in a shop class and I used to wash his car and drive it around the parking lot, so that was a big deal, but we became friends. Actually, his brother, who I'm visiting with right now, his little brother, what was the alfalfa and what was the other guy?"
},
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"start_time": 828.848,
"text": " Buckwheat. Buckwheat and alfalfa. That was our nicknames when we started the drugs. We really got along good. He was like the coolest, hippiest guy you could ever imagine. But he got arrested in my first year out of high school. He got arrested for bank robbery."
},
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"start_time": 850.538,
"text": " What year was this? I was 1972, I think he got around, I graduated in 1971. But we were friends since 10th grade, you know, even when I wasn't doing drugs, he was a cool guy. And it was another, him and another guy after I graduated from high school, a little bit of pot and, you know, they had a party and, you know, I started doing cocaine, I tried cocaine and that became my best friend. Right."
},
{
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"start_time": 878.524,
"text": " I could be socially accepted everywhere I went when I had that cocaine. That's where it really started. When I got to wrestling and left, I said, man, I was captain of the football team, captain of the wrestling team. I had a gift. I would"
},
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"text": " Even in sports, instead of telling people what to do, I would show them what to do. I would be a leader and example. And so, when this is a perfect opportunity, I think I've been bred for this because of my grandfather. I said, okay, well I started, first started getting high and just being a regular street dealer, you know, and then the cocaine became a little bit more important and then I could see how I could"
},
{
"end_time": 954.428,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 926.442,
"text": " take this bag or something and cut it a little bit and get my stash and also a lot of new friends. I thought they were friends at the time, but that was a way for me to feel like I was somebody. I could feel confident because I had no confidence. In sports, I had confidence, but that only lasts so long. That's a real high, the feeling sports gives you. It's good for your body and"
},
{
"end_time": 977.841,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 954.701,
"text": " But I recognized I took all my trophies and everything, threw them in the trash, and said, I know this isn't going to be my future. So that's kind of where it started before it got to where it ended up. So that continued to just, you know, what, bloom?"
},
{
"end_time": 990.503,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 978.319,
"text": " Well, you know, Dale was in jail. How long did he get? I think it was three years and they sent him to a camp up in West Virginia, a Morgantown, West Virginia."
},
{
"end_time": 1020.333,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 990.964,
"text": " And you know, then we started doing some acid and you know, so I took some acid drove up to West Virginia and had a visit with him and I had some cigars, broke them down, put some cocaine in there and you know, was bold enough to walk in there and give him that pack and you know, he got it and took it behind the bars and he got high. But he while he was in jail, there was a guy and I'll just say his first name Louie from New York and his dad was"
},
{
"end_time": 1048.882,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1021.271,
"text": " It started with a scream inside a quiet Maryland home. A mother trying to protect the family dog and her son in the grip of a violent hallucinogenic rage. By the time it was over, she was dead."
},
{
"end_time": 1064.991,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1049.326,
"text": " And he claimed LSD made him do it. His name, David Minor IV, and we talked to him. Listen to Invisible Choir every other week as we uncover the most haunting true crimes you've never heard of, available wherever you get your podcasts."
},
{
"end_time": 1099.394,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1073.575,
"text": " I said, well, let's go. When he got out, I went up there to New York, I mean, up to West Virginia, drove him home. And we were tight. You know, we were brothers. And we ended up going back to New York and visiting East Houston Street. You know, here I'm a white guy and a black guy and we're going to a Spanish Harlem or wherever that was. And, you know, two guys met us with guns, you know, off packing. He walked us down the block."
},
{
"end_time": 1127.227,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1099.718,
"text": " And then we got the OK on the first floor and then, you know, every floor they had, they had guys sitting at the windows. And then when we got up to his room, you know, his his dad, which was the guy. I'll just tell you this story. It's amazing. This makes me makes me think of Frank Lucas from the American gangster. Yeah. Buried by the US government and ignored by the national media. This is the story they don't want you to know."
},
{
"end_time": 1148.712,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1127.961,
"text": " When Frank Amadeo met with President George W. Bush at the White House to discuss NATO operations in Afghanistan, no one knew that he'd already embezzled nearly $200 million from the federal government, money he intended to use to bankroll his plan to take over the world. From Amadeo's global headquarters in the shadow of Florida's Disney"
},
{
"end_time": 1177.961,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1149.087,
"text": " With a nearly inexhaustible supply of the Internal Revenue Service's funds, Amadeo acquired multiple businesses, amassing a mega-conglomerate. Driven by his delusions of world conquest, he negotiated the purchase of a squadron of American fighter jets and the controlling interests in a former Soviet ICBM factory. He began work to build the largest private militia on the planet, over one million Africans strong. Simultaneously,"
},
{
"end_time": 1205.93,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1178.422,
"text": " Amadeo hired an international black ops force to orchestrate a coup in the Congo while plotting to take over several small Eastern European countries. The most disturbing part of it all is, had the US government not thwarted his plans, he might have just pulled it off. It's insanity. The bizarre true story of a bipolar megalomaniac's insane plan for total world domination. Available now on Amazon and Audible."
},
{
"end_time": 1226.015,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1206.101,
"text": " So anyway, we got in there, you know, and I was fearless. I don't know how, why, you know, but here we got a black guy and a white guy and they could have thrown us in the river thinking that we were trying to set him up because Louis just got out of jail. And then his dad drives up in a limousine, just like TV, white hair."
},
{
"end_time": 1249.582,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1226.613,
"text": " comes in and he wouldn't go upstairs until they got the okay that I was okay because they thought you know of course everybody if you're if you're a drug dealer you're looking at everybody everybody's gonna set you up so but they came upstairs and that was the first time I ever did heroin they chopped it up showed us how to cut it it was brown you know there's a formula they had that they I forget how they"
},
{
"end_time": 1259.787,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1251.254,
"text": " Mix the drugs and put it on the stove and cut the brown heroin, I think it was brown sugar or something, and then I did a big line."
},
{
"end_time": 1284.974,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1260.367,
"text": " Like I said, I never even did heroin before, and Dale did some. So by the time we got back to the train station, Dale could not even see. He couldn't hardly walk, and somehow the heroin didn't affect me like it did him. So I put the heroin in my sock, and we left him in the train station. He was in there, took all his clothes off, and he was sweating so bad he couldn't see. He was blind. I said, okay, I got to leave."
},
{
"end_time": 1315.009,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1285.333,
"text": " got on the train and you know thinking we were going to get a dog would be on the train and you know so that was the first real big experience of a mafia family and getting involved and it's quite thrilling you know you're you're you're at your peak of your of you know everything every cell in your body is is trying to understand it and and be calm and go through and so it got back home and that was the start of where we're continued to"
},
{
"end_time": 1318.234,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1316.886,
"text": " Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 1347.654,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1318.712,
"text": " And I mean, how often did you make that trip or did you? Well, that was the first trip we went up. We started. I didn't really. After about six months, I almost got busted. Actually, another undercover agent from Montgomery County I actually grew up with since I was three years old. And I went to sell, give somebody a stash of heroin to see if they could"
},
{
"end_time": 1364.411,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1348.49,
"text": " but they could be somebody that we could sell it and it was an old guy that was on the wrestling team and he got caught selling TVs and I didn't know he was trying to set me up. So this is the first time that I almost got arrested but I didn't and I knew"
},
{
"end_time": 1394.411,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1365.418,
"text": " Why didn't I get arrested? I have no idea. So I was supposed to meet this guy at McDonald's and it just seems strange to me. This is where you learn how to be a good drug dealer by experience. Nobody can teach you. So I met this guy going to McDonald's. I can remember all this stuff like it was yesterday. So I walked in McDonald's and I just felt so funny and I saw a black car and I said something's not right. So I left McDonald's and"
},
{
"end_time": 1413.49,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1394.923,
"text": " The next day I was over at another wrestler's house in Aspen Hill and I walked in and he says, oh yeah, he was kind of joking with me about being paranoid. He says, I got an undercover cop that lives right over there and I saw that exact car."
},
{
"end_time": 1434.957,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1414.036,
"text": " the night before or the evening before I was supposed to meet, I saw that one at McDonald's. So I realized that the undercover cop is the guy that I left the meeting and that kind of blew my mind that this guy would try to set me up. This was my first heroin transaction. I almost got busted. Right."
},
{
"end_time": 1454.497,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1436.203,
"text": " So with all that said, we started meeting. Louie came down from Maryland. They had another buy in our apartment that I got an apartment with that guy Dale and the Montgomery County on narcotics squad asked me to come in and they wanted to interview me."
},
{
"end_time": 1474.821,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1454.991,
"text": " And I went to my buddy, the guy that I grew up with was undercover and he kind of coached me. He says, they don't have you, but if you say something. Because they knew Dale was a bank robber and Dale had been dealing for years, so they knew that we lived together."
},
{
"end_time": 1494.036,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1474.821,
"text": " I went through that experience and realized"
},
{
"end_time": 1522.841,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1495.265,
"text": " how to work through a situation with the police on me and getting back out. And, you know, you go through traumatic pressure through all this. I'm sure you understand that. And so that was the first time I got out of there, you know, moved out of the apartment with Dale and then got into trying to quit. I tried to quit dealing and that lasted about a week."
},
{
"end_time": 1538.507,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1523.507,
"text": " So that was my first experience with almost getting busted in the New York and really"
},
{
"end_time": 1561.903,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1538.507,
"text": " Building a bond with Dale in his boldness, you know, he's pretty bold guy You know, there's certain things you got to be to be a good drug dealer and it's pretty bold, you know We were you know back then it was more of a thrill. It wasn't to shoot him up everything like it's become today, right? so how how long did this go on before um, well the"
},
{
"end_time": 1579.838,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1562.398,
"text": " I found a couple people in town that were selling cocaine and went through learning about cocaine. That was the biggest thing, because everybody's got the best. You had to learn the quality."
},
{
"end_time": 1601.408,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1580.145,
"text": " and I started dealing and the next trip I took was I drove out to California with a friend just for fun and I ran into a group there that had the best cocaine I ever did. I've only been doing cocaine for a couple years but this is about 1975 so about four years I had been"
},
{
"end_time": 1631.135,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1601.408,
"text": " doing cocaine in the area and dealing with it the best I could as a small time because I was at the bottom of the chain instead of the top of the chain. Right. And so I went out to LA and I found this cocaine that I never, it was just really good. So came back home. I started dating a girl that her mom owned a head shop. Her brother was one of the, probably the second biggest bookie in the area. And I became friends. I mean, some of these, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 1657.517,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1631.51,
"text": " Some of the guys like bookies and everything back then were just characters, just fun to be around and just attracted everybody. They were the life of the party kind of people. And I borrowed $8,000 from him. I said, listen, I was selling him pot. He loved to smoke pot. So I took that $8,000, got on a plane, went to San Francisco, and"
},
{
"end_time": 1685.691,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1657.739,
"text": " My buddy that I went with, you know, they started, oh, we got the cocaine, but we ran out of that. And then we went on this trail all around town and never could get a sample. And then they waited until we were just getting ready to get on the airplane. They said, oh, we found it. So we got it. Wasn't even able to try it or anything. And, you know, put it, we had a banjo. We put it in the back of the banjo, put it on the plane, came home and got ripped off. You know, it was garbage."
},
{
"end_time": 1700.998,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1686.323,
"text": " And that was my big lesson. I thought, oh man, these guys are going to shoot me. I'm not going to have the money to pay them. I think I got back $2,000 out of some bogus cocaine that I tried to sell. So that was my second big lesson."
},
{
"end_time": 1731.288,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1701.647,
"text": " What kind of money were you making in general? That was really support and habit right then. That wasn't the money. If you want me to keep telling you the process, then I've met a guy in Bethesda about 50 miles out of town in Front Royal. I went out there and he was getting cocaine from Bolivia. He had a"
},
{
"end_time": 1756.391,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1731.715,
"text": " a way that they were sending it to him in the mail. And that's where I really learned what quality was. And that was another big lesson, you know, with Dale and the people who were around, how people really abused the power of having drugs and manipulating people around. And then the girls got involved with some of the Redskins. That was another"
},
{
"end_time": 1783.387,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1756.852,
"text": " mafia group that was not as big as they thought they were, but that was really a football team. That's what I thought, but then you said kind of a mafia. Well, it was who was around some of the guys that played, you know, and that's where I got my taste of what that was. And then how the girl, what my girlfriend that I used to have a girlfriend,"
},
{
"end_time": 1814.309,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1784.48,
"text": " That we stayed friends, she became friends, or supposedly getting married with one of the Redskins. They had a kid and that was another whole process of learning the manipulation and how people use people when they have drugs. So that was kind of hard because of how they treated women. I don't know if people know the other side of the sports and how women get treated, but it's pretty"
},
{
"end_time": 1835.572,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1815.299,
"text": " It's pretty, I don't know how you want to put it, egregious. Yeah. Yeah. So that really stunned me. And so, so I learned a little bit from this guy in front Royal and then we had the Redskins and then there was a lady, a friend of mine that the guy that turned me on to cocaine, you know, his brother had a maid from Bolivia."
},
{
"end_time": 1855.247,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1835.981,
"text": " And then I got"
},
{
"end_time": 1881.988,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1855.794,
"text": " Through the traumatic experience when I went out to Virginia, my girlfriend started sleeping with this guy that had the best cocaine and that just tore me up. With that pressure and what I've been through and the police kind of starting to watch me, I had a nervous breakdown. My reality was so far out there, I could not even function and got put in a psych ward."
},
{
"end_time": 1901.186,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1882.449,
"text": " So I was in a psych ward in 1976 and that was, you know, how could I fit in the world and, you know, what was life about? You know, what does this all mean? You know, trying to figure my purpose out. I was just going to say you didn't really have a purpose."
},
{
"end_time": 1930.742,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1901.374,
"text": " Yeah, I was just kind of existing. Yeah. Yeah, you know, but I knew there was something, you know, my grandfather, you know, how can I make this be something that I really enjoyed? What was this about? What was my niche in all this? And I didn't want to be used and underneath these guys that had the families and how they were abusing people, you know, so I thought I could do it better than them. Right. And, you know, and that that that experience came back out. I was there for"
},
{
"end_time": 1960.418,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1931.015,
"text": " two weeks. Where? In Springfield State Hospital. Oh, okay. You know, and then I said, tried to get a job. You know, I said, okay, I'm going to quit dealing. My dad drove me, I was up near BWI airport in Baltimore. He drove me to a job interview and I walked in this building and they gave me some papers, this fill out, and I couldn't even write down my name and address and what I could do. And I kind of folded the papers up, sit them on the table and walked out."
},
{
"end_time": 1990.452,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 1961.169,
"text": " And I said, okay, I know what I got to do. You jumped on a plane to Bolivia? Well, now it's coming. I was, but yeah, that was the start of just feeling that I didn't fit. You know, just couldn't adjust with the pain and the things I was traveling with in my life. It's just a ball of confusion. And where could I get my spot, if you want to call it, that I was going to be successful?"
},
{
"end_time": 2019.189,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 1991.527,
"text": " So, but that was the start of where it ended up. So the guy that turned me on to cocaine and we did some business. So as this was going on, I was building my little empire of understanding how to function among all the criminals. I was a criminal too, but you know, I didn't look at myself as a criminal, but I was too."
},
{
"end_time": 2049.343,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2019.906,
"text": " And so I got that connection and this girl, finally he convinced his brother to give us her telephone number. She was from Bolivia. So she called up one night. She says, okay, this is me and my buddy. I'm going to meet you in Georgetown. And she gave us an address and it was an alley. And it was about 12 o'clock at night. And I didn't know if this was the final hit. They finally set me up."
},
{
"end_time": 2069.838,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2049.77,
"text": " And because you never know who's doing what in the world. And so we drove down to, that was about an hour's drive from where we lived, drove down, parked and was walking in this alley and there was a beautiful Bolivian, looked like a model."
},
{
"end_time": 2097.91,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2070.247,
"text": " And I said, okay, this has got to be a setup. This can't be real. And she broke an English, beautiful accent. You know, you would dream about meeting somebody like this. And she gave me a bag and she says, okay, this is what you're going to do. You sell this, I'm going to meet you back in two weeks. You guys give me the money. So that's how it started. And I think we got, when we first started, it was just about five ounces, not a bunch."
},
{
"end_time": 2104.77,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2098.729,
"text": " But I hustled, got the money, gave her the money. So I did work with her for about five years."
},
{
"end_time": 2134.411,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2106.101,
"text": " And then her boss... That same process? Yeah, same process. Well, it would be meeting different places. I met her in front of the airport. She'd walk out of the airport. I had a Doverman. I had a van, a big tank of water. Driving up to the airport is not the smart thing to do because, you know, you never want to get blocked in. You're a drug dealer. You learn how to do things a little safe. But she had the boldness. It's like she had a license to do what she did. She walked out of the airport."
},
{
"end_time": 2155.145,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2134.974,
"text": " got in the van, gave us, I think, a pound, a pound, that's how we started, and got back out and she said, I'll see you in about a month. A pound of what? Cocaine. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, when I say cocaine, it was as good as you could imagine. They don't, anything that goes through the mob and came in, nothing was like this."
},
{
"end_time": 2173.609,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2155.435,
"text": " It was, I think they charged me like a thousand dollars an ounce and the market for that without cutting it was about two thousand at that time. And then if you cut it a little bit, which I was very, I wanted to build a market. I wanted the best in town and that's where I started my market."
},
{
"end_time": 2203.712,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2174.582,
"text": " If I was going to build what I was trying to build, I needed the best product. And so I've been, what, almost five years of getting a bunch of garbage, and once in a while you get something that was good. But that's where I could build what I was trying to build. So what kind of money are you still making now? Are you doing decent? Yeah, I was making, I would say, we would make"
},
{
"end_time": 2229.309,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2204.138,
"text": " between $15,000 and $20,000. At that time, it was a pretty good market, and it would take me a week to do that. And then her boss understood, so my reputation started traveling back in Bolivia. We got a guy in the United States that he pays, and we trust him. And then her boss"
},
{
"end_time": 2259.667,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2229.667,
"text": " Are you are I mean, I mean, before we get to that, like, are you are people around you getting busted or anything? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, in the meantime, when she wasn't around, because that would land, there was no I had no idea when she was coming and when she wasn't coming. And there was times when it would be three or four months that she wouldn't disappear. I had no telephone number. The only thing she had was my number. Right. I had no control of when she would show up."
},
{
"end_time": 2287.346,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2259.667,
"text": " So in the meantime, I said, well, I got to do something. I got tired of waiting. And then I wanted to go down to Florida, because that's where the action was. And my uncle was a bartender. And he was kind of the guy that was my idol when I grew up. He had a brand new Cadillac every year come down, had the trunk full of Playboys, lifted weights, had a tattoo, the model. That's who I modeled myself. My father and I didn't get along."
},
{
"end_time": 2312.159,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2287.961,
"text": " Family stuff was a mess. That was the guy that showed me how to work on engines. He was like the king for me. He was a bartender down there. He was an alcoholic. He and Barry, which I mentioned to you, they were buddies. They went treasure hunting in South America. They were the real deal."
},
{
"end_time": 2341.92,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2312.415,
"text": " My uncle had been arrested in South America for gun smuggling. So that's what he did when they were all mixed with guns. They were the old time guys. Barry and this CIA agent that we'll get to later in the story used to be Dean Martins and Frank Sinatra's captain on their boat. So the guy Barry, which I'll share more about, he and I became friends."
},
{
"end_time": 2363.951,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2342.125,
"text": " and uh he didn't use coke he was a drinker but he could speak spanish so i needed a translator to get to this next step that i was about ready to take so i started uh dealing a little bit of drugs for the cocaine cowboys that was in fort lauderdale so i went down there and he introduced me to them and they took me under their wing they liked me"
},
{
"end_time": 2389.77,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2364.172,
"text": " you know, gave me a car when I came down there. It was pretty, pretty wild. They were really wild, but they will, they, they were the kind of guys that would use you and then set you up. So when they get in trouble, that's how they kept their market going. They would build a clientele and then they would set people up and the people that were working with them would let them continue to deal. So there was some big lawyers involved, the big money, real big money."
},
{
"end_time": 2413.524,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2390.418,
"text": " So the big money, the money that I started making, started when I got in touch with that gentleman, I gave you that picture. Right. This is Barry Seale, the movie. Yeah. American Made. American Made, the guy that they made that movie about Barry, one of the guys, and I met the pilots."
},
{
"end_time": 2443.78,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2413.916,
"text": " from Barry. They were, I mentioned that CIA airport, that was all set up by the CIA and they let them use the airport. And then when they decided to close them, I guess they were, as they did that, the CIA, they were setting up, they were infiltrating all the market that they wanted to. So when they got finished with them, they arrested them all. This is the real story. And then they had a judge, I think it was North Carolina, South Carolina,"
},
{
"end_time": 2468.558,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2444.104,
"text": " They had a judge, so Barry and his partner, the pilots all went to prison. I think they got like five years in the movie. And then Barry and his partner, they made them get all the money and they came in the courtroom. Barry told me, he says, we had garbage, you know, trash bags full of money and the judge made them give them all the money and send them out."
},
{
"end_time": 2497.312,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2469.377,
"text": " So it was all about the money sifting and getting into right hands. You know, we know what we know about that. I was going to say, yeah, I had seen the movie when they made it back in the 80s. It was on like HBO. And this was when, who was that? I forget the guy like Tom Cruise played the remake, but I forget Dennis Hopper. Oh, really? I didn't. He played Barry Sale. OK. And I always remember"
},
{
"end_time": 2527.261,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2497.807,
"text": " you know the end of that movie where they sent him where the they sentenced him to the halfway house like you have you can you can work but you have to be at the halfway house every night and he said he says in that one he says to the judge what are you talking about like if you make me go to the you're just they'll just kill me in the halfway house and he's doing the judges like get out of here you're fine you're getting a deal and sure enough they they kill him in the halfway house yeah pulls up and they're waiting for him yeah um"
},
{
"end_time": 2546.271,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2528.166,
"text": " So at what point do you end up going to, do you start importing stuff from? Well, so as I was working with Barry and getting this experience and"
},
{
"end_time": 2572.432,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2547.278,
"text": " I'm trying to think of when the law, of course, I was best friends with a guy in D.C. that was like a mafia family. He had a strip club and different clubs. He was my grandfather and his father were friends. So the people I was around and my record in the DEA and"
},
{
"end_time": 2601.817,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2573.097,
"text": " were right close and now Barry and the guy that set up Barry, which we found out was the old guy from the captain when they used to captain Frank Sinatra's boat. He was in the CIA and at that time I didn't know what his part was. And so we needed somebody to fly a shipment to from Florida to me and they used him to do that. And then right before he flew back,"
},
{
"end_time": 2630.913,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2602.466,
"text": " They told me that he just busted, I think it was a plane from Columbia. There must have been a ton of cocaine. And he was the guy that they used. And we didn't know it at the time, but we'd already set up him flying cocaine to me. I mean, the CIA, they work inside. I mean, this is, they have a cover that lasts for years. And so I have a guy coming to Maryland from, Barry's sending him"
},
{
"end_time": 2653.677,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2631.374,
"text": " bringing a shipment from the cocaine cowboys and he's a CIA agent. And here I am, you know, he, they kind of knew I was working with this Bolivian group and my boss was best friends with the guy in Noriega. And that's when they were trying to get the evidence for Noriega and before they were setting him up."
},
{
"end_time": 2683.234,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2654.002,
"text": " So I couldn't tell who I was with when when this thing started rolling with my new boss, the guy that came from Bolivia. When it came in, it went to the police in Miami. I would go down with Barry and they would give it to Barry to give to me. So it got so difficult to know who side I was really on. And that's kind of where I was at with starting my"
},
{
"end_time": 2712.432,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2683.507,
"text": " My relationship with the guy in Bolivia and that's does that makes is it making sense? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I was thinking about, um, I was just wondering to myself, uh, when we said Noriega, I was wondering if Colby knew who Manuel Noriega was. Well, he was, uh, a pan, it was a Panama, right? Yeah, it was Panama. He was the president. Yeah. Yeah. That was when the big cartel was really had control of the money."
},
{
"end_time": 2722.978,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2712.858,
"text": " the people that were really involved were him and some people, you know, it was a select few that was friends with him that were covered"
},
{
"end_time": 2746.203,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2723.439,
"text": " in many ways. They wanted me to meet him, but I was afraid to, and Barry met him in Miami. They were pulling me even closer, and I said, nope, I'm not going to get that close. So, I mean, this is the president of Panama, you know, the Panama Canal, Panama, like in Central America, and he's running"
},
{
"end_time": 2763.712,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2746.203,
"text": " He's running drugs. He's letting drugs get run through the company and eventually they're selling drugs to get money to buy arms for the Contras."
},
{
"end_time": 2787.705,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2764.343,
"text": " a militant group that was trying to overthrow. What were they trying to overthrow? Was it Colombia? I don't know if it was one of those countries then, I don't know the whole detail. So they're trying to overthrow like a communist regime or something in there, you know. I mean it was a complete clusterfuck, like it was just completely just, but"
},
{
"end_time": 2815.145,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2787.705,
"text": " The CIA is actively working with them to get the money because Congress, they couldn't get money from Congress to fund these guys for this revolution. So what do they do? They start working with these guys in Panama and letting them, and selling drugs, letting the drugs go in and out to get the money to buy the guns. And it's just, it's just, it's ridiculous. But this is like the president of a country and one of our allies. And then Reagan,"
},
{
"end_time": 2840.316,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2815.794,
"text": " Sends in troops to arrest Noriega. Yeah, like because I mean, how do you say? Hey, you've been indicted like it's like saying it's like saying gg ping has been indicted We need you guys to hand them over That's not gonna happen. So they send in American troops to a ref and there's a huge gun battle I mean this goes on like all like like a day or two. Yeah, this is yeah, I"
},
{
"end_time": 2861.886,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2840.742,
"text": " I think it got too close to getting the truth out and what was really going on and they shut it down. Then Ronald Reagan gets pulled in front of Congress and he can't remember nothing. I think he had about 30 different ways to say, I don't recall."
},
{
"end_time": 2890.128,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2862.21,
"text": " You know, at this time, I don't presently recall what happened. You know, I'm not sure. I would have to check with my so-and-so. At that time, I believe that I cannot recall exactly what happened. I mean, it was, it was like, this is amazing. It was like watching Bill Clinton give those answers. It's like, did he just, like, how are your sides, like, you're a professional sidestepper. Like, it almost, I almost feel like you answered the question. You didn't, but I almost feel like you did. You're so good at it."
},
{
"end_time": 2900.52,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2890.742,
"text": " And that was the Iran-Contra whole affair, but it was all these guys were just involved and the government's involved and that's, it's kind of like the"
},
{
"end_time": 2927.654,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2902.073,
"text": " Fast and furious where they're they're they're pulling guns, you know from drug dealers and selling them to the to the cartel like it's it's insane It's a what are you doing? This is the DEA ATF and DEA, you know that are involved in this like that You're not supposed to be doing those things. Yeah, they did some stuff that they don't not supposed to do They don't do listen they don't do nearly as good of a job in"
},
{
"end_time": 2956.305,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2928.49,
"text": " The Tom Cruise one? I didn't see the first one. The first one is better because you have a full understanding that like this is clearly, this is what's happening. It's hard to follow in the Tom Cruise one. It's more flash and... But it was a good movie. Yeah, these guys are, you know, all these people are really unique and individuals. I mean, you know, they just chose this other side of the street."
},
{
"end_time": 2985.862,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2956.766,
"text": " So it's, it's funny, you don't, you never really get like a, a super average normal guy, you know, in like the drug criminals are extreme personalities. Yes, you're right. Yeah. They're either there's so much talent sitting behind bars. It's amazing how to say that, you know, if they could ever understand how to find the life that they could be successful with, like you have been, and, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 3009.667,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 2986.288,
"text": " I'll tell a little bit more about where I came, but there's a ton of talent sitting behind bars. Sad. So at some point you say, hey, I'm just going to start shipping this stuff in from Bolivia. So then I started working with my boss. They brought me down to Bolivia, invited me to come visit."
},
{
"end_time": 3040.026,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3010.196,
"text": " You know, at that time, you know, I was a pretty business type guy, you know, silk suits and, you know, I enjoyed having money. And, you know, I guess at that time, I guess a big shipment was about 10 keys for me. And, you know, my habit was way, way, I was drinking about a fifth of what's"
},
{
"end_time": 3051.374,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3040.708,
"text": " What's my drink with the blue case? Crown Royale. Crown Royale. It's been 37 years since, but I was probably drinking a fifth of Crown Royale almost a day."
},
{
"end_time": 3080.162,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3052.005,
"text": " and smoking pot and getting high, you know, because I had the DEA, the FBI, and the CIA all around what I was doing. And I got pulled out of the airport. That shipment that that CIA guy brought, I left Florida and stuck about a gram in my pocket because I knew I was being watched. I wouldn't travel. I was smart enough not to travel and move it myself because that's when"
},
{
"end_time": 3107.176,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3080.162,
"text": " You know, I didn't want to jeopardize. I knew I was being watched and they pulled me out. And that was Ronald Reagan Airport. I walked outside, was getting in the cabin, a lady looked like a grandmother, flipped the badge, DEA. She said, son, come on, we're going to talk to you. You know, pulled me out of there, took me down in a basement. And, you know, I was making excuses. All my uncles are an alcoholic and I had to go to Florida to help them."
},
{
"end_time": 3135.162,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3107.415,
"text": " And they went through my collar and I've had some real thick socks on. And I had a gram in there and they went down my legs and missed it. And I was sweating. But that really, you know, and then I knew that was the day before the guy from the CIA was shipping, coming, flying in. And I think they thought they had me and they didn't and they didn't blow his cover."
},
{
"end_time": 3150.333,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3135.708,
"text": " And I had like three or four different places in Maryland. One was in Annapolis. I had different places. I was hiding everything, you know, and moving it around because that was the only thing I knew is to stay ahead of everybody. So that was"
},
{
"end_time": 3169.735,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3150.776,
"text": " That was the start and then after that, then we started, I got invited down to, got through that and that was with Cocaine Cowboys. I was doing a little bit with the Cuban mafia in the Keys. They were big pot smugglers and that was real bad cocaine. I worked with them for a while and that wasn't"
},
{
"end_time": 3192.654,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3170.998,
"text": " That wasn't good because you get a batch and then you'd have a hard time selling it and then they would be back up in Maryland kind of threatening me, you know, what are you going to do? And I had to, I did some of the money. They had shipped something in that they smuggled it in diesel and it smelled like it was horrible. So anyway, I lost money on that and I gave them a sports car I had built to pay them off, to make them happy."
},
{
"end_time": 3222.312,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3193.2,
"text": " and then going to Bolivia with my boss. I would die before I would tell on them. It was family. They trusted me. You go through a life of drug and then you get to a place that people really cared and trusted you. Even when I got arrested, they tried to get me to set them up."
},
{
"end_time": 3248.985,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3222.807,
"text": " I didn't. I said, you know, if I did the crime, I was going to do the time. And that's another part of the story that's coming up, getting pulled over. But so let me take the story this way. So I was at the edge, you know, my boss was in New York and he got pulled over. This is right before Noriega got arrested."
},
{
"end_time": 3278.148,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3249.411,
"text": " And I believe he was used by our government to get what they needed to set up the, uh, the invasion that they had for him. And I was just on the outside of that. And, and, um, I think I was watched as I was dealing and they were using it also to kind of corner him, but for somehow I did not get arrested. It was beyond my understanding that what I was doing, I didn't get stopped. And, and, but,"
},
{
"end_time": 3306.408,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3278.814,
"text": " You know, so I tried to, when he got, when there was about six months where I couldn't get in touch with him and I said, I got to get out or I know I'm going to do big time. I know I'm going to be dead or I'm going to do big time. So I said, I'm going to open a recording studio. And in the recording studio, I said, well, this is one way I'll be able to support my habit and not have to deal because, you know, I was,"
},
{
"end_time": 3332.108,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3306.596,
"text": " I had a huge monster habit of cocaine. You get used to spending money and it's hard not to change unless you change your whole life. It's hard to get out of whatever you're doing when you get used to money. You probably know that better than I do. So I opened up a recording. I took the money. The last trip I had about 20 ounces and about"
},
{
"end_time": 3360.128,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3332.534,
"text": " $40,000 and I said okay I'm gonna take that aside I'm gonna build a recording studio and I'm gonna somehow get a hit record because I said this is the only way I'm ever gonna get out. So another friend that I'm still friends with you know had a piece of property my father left my family left and I was trying to buy it from them had a garage that I used to have a carpet company when I was"
},
{
"end_time": 3380.623,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3360.538,
"text": " I remodeled that building and built a recording studio. So in about a year after I got it all put together, it was almost like I was blessed for somehow"
},
{
"end_time": 3394.104,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3381.766,
"text": " And I was kind of on the side of demonic side or Satan's world. I'm just going to give this in spiritual terms. I was kind of able to move in darkness without anybody stopping me."
},
{
"end_time": 3423.592,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3394.548,
"text": " You know the blessings I call them worldly blessings of you know meeting that girl and how I Didn't get in trouble. I didn't get shy. I mean my friends were getting shot. I was in I was in some rough places in DC. I mean I had no fear I don't know what you know what protected me, but anyway got through all that And this recording studio so I was this guy that had done three albums with Warner Brothers and"
},
{
"end_time": 3445.913,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3424.821,
"text": " Unbelievable. I'm not going to mention his name because he still has the company. He's still doing his thing. But he was a cult. He had six wives and 21 kids at the time. He was my age. How old was I? I was 33 years old."
},
{
"end_time": 3466.391,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3446.903,
"text": " and Warner Brothers blackballed him. He had articles in Playboy and unbelievable Stevie Wonder, James Brown type of charisma, just an unbelievable magnetic man, a black man that"
},
{
"end_time": 3496.015,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3466.783,
"text": " had all the talent in the world, but the industry was scared of him because of what he believed in and they shut him down. And he was looking for a guy that had a studio and money. And of course it was me. So when we got together, it was like, we fit like a glove. You know, it was like, uh, I wanted to be successful to, to continue my lifestyle. And he needed somebody like me to back him that wasn't afraid of the industry or, you know, so we started an album, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 3525.35,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3496.51,
"text": " And that album took us about two years. And I was at that time, I had no understanding of what it took to produce a hit record. So he taught me. And I mean, it was drooling the time we spent in the studio and what he did with all the musicians. I mean, oh, I mean, when you say cutting a groove years ago, when they cut a groove, they worked until they couldn't stand and produce something unbelievable. It's not like today is a little different when you produce stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 3555.691,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3525.691,
"text": " That was a different era that used to do it on the two inch tape, you know, it wasn't done with the computer agents. It was like used to have to bounce tracks. And so I really got broken into the music industry and learning how to do that. But when you get into a call, there's a spiritual force that we all are in and understanding that is where this what God or what what my life has helped me understand is"
},
{
"end_time": 3580.196,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3556.101,
"text": " You know, we all have gifts. You know, I have a gift that I used for my own success as a drug dealer and just all the pain and things that I lived in, I didn't know I didn't have to. So, you know, I'm in this time with this cult and I had a girlfriend."
},
{
"end_time": 3608.063,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3580.555,
"text": " that was a real hippie. Back then, we were hippies. Hippies are drug dealers, one or the other, and I was a drug dealer. So after two years, I ran out of money. And, you know, my family, the boss's wife called me because he was not able to move anymore. And she said, you want to come down to Miami? I got I got and I wasn't trying. I was trying not to go anymore. I was trying not to be involved."
},
{
"end_time": 3635.589,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3608.575,
"text": " and Barry, which was my driver, was he was in Columbia. He'd spent a lot of time in Columbia. And so I would had to go get it. And, you know, I had long hair, you know, it was like a rock, you know, kind of rock star, you know, velvet sports jacket, top hat, you know, you know, very exotic kind of person at the time. You stuck out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And not afraid to. And that was very,"
},
{
"end_time": 3665.026,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3636.305,
"text": " a side of my personality that I'm kind of glad that's not there anymore because it wasn't balanced with, you know, being socially acceptable. Right. I'm going to say that I'm sure the Coke helped. Well, it did. It did. It certainly gave me that euphoric that is not grounded for reality. I'll put it that way. That confidence to stand out and not be self"
},
{
"end_time": 3689.514,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3665.555,
"text": " concerned at all. Yeah, I get it. So, did you go down there? What happened? Well, so, right before I left and, you know, I was trying to decide what side of my own am I going to try to be on a side of life that was, how would I say,"
},
{
"end_time": 3718.831,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3690.589,
"text": " appreciated people in a different way that you are when you do when you're a rock star and that how how the sex industry and how the music is promoted and how dramatic and how many people get hurt along the way and how people get used and abused and and i had to make a decision am i going to be over here with with him and go for this thing you know we had a song called universal party and"
},
{
"end_time": 3748.951,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3719.343,
"text": " It's a piece that could move a lot of people in a direction. Am I going to be on this dark side and be a drug dealer? What is my life all about? Why did God or whatever power let me get this far? I was trying to figure out, being in a psych ward and all the things I experienced, the pain I was still carrying, what does it all mean? We all get to this point in life."
},
{
"end_time": 3779.189,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3749.531,
"text": " Right before I left, I prayed, first time I ever prayed to God. I said, God, I said, I can't stop something. I said, I can't stop. I can't, I gotta quit this. I was such, you know, I had a deviated septum. I couldn't hardly drink anymore. You know, I was, couldn't hardly do. Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store"
},
{
"end_time": 3807.056,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3782.756,
"text": " Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull? Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where everyone in the family can choose their own plan and save. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Rankings based on root metric, true score report dated 1H2025, your results may vary. Must provide a post-paid consumer mobile bill dated within the past 45 days. Bill must be in the same name as the person with the immediate deal. Additional terms apply. I don't drink any Coke anymore because my nose would bleed and it was just"
},
{
"end_time": 3835.026,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3807.056,
"text": " the insanity of that life. And I had to make a decision, am I going to stay here? And I prayed to God, I said, if you stop me, I'll turn my life over to you. So I went down to Miami and met his wife and they had all the mules. They had probably six to eight people that they would pack up. When you left Bolivia, they had a room you went through. And they asked me when I was in Bolivia,"
},
{
"end_time": 3864.94,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3835.282,
"text": " they would pay that lady to get you to through to Miami and then when you went to customs they already had that set up who was going through so they that's how that's how it works and then the government get paid everybody is paid but they they got that group through and met me and you know the people got a room I got a room and then all the mules came to the room and unloaded their stuff it was all wrapped in bags and crust and they had it on them all different ways and so I left"
},
{
"end_time": 3895.094,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3865.247,
"text": " Miami coming back and you know it was a out of all the years I ever did cocaine that was the best batch the last batch was the best batch and so I got out of Miami and came to got in Woodbine which is the first right in Georgia got over the line and by three o'clock in the morning you know I had a Cadillac hat on you know all that got pulled over and and my girlfriend was with me"
},
{
"end_time": 3915.213,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3895.367,
"text": " And they put me in the back of that police car and I said, I'm yours. So that was my surrender. Why did they pull you over? I think, I don't know who set me up. I don't know if it was, I met the guy from Cuba down there. I don't know if the sheriff would never tell me. We're still friends. I talked to him a month ago. He won't tell me."
},
{
"end_time": 3942.961,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3915.828,
"text": " He won't tell me. He's ex-FBI. He was the FBI agent for, like, he worked under J. Edgar Hoover. He worked for, I think, 15 years before he came sheriff. I mean, he had some power in that town. And so somebody gave him the, what, just somebody said, pull this car out or search the car. Well, in Woodbine, Georgia, it was the first state, first town out. He had, that was where they would set people up"
},
{
"end_time": 3963.848,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3943.609,
"text": " coming out of Florida. That was the FBI connection and all the snitches and all that stuff. That was the town you got pulled over. So there was 10 other people in there from coming that way. That was cocaine corridor. And so I got pulled over, popped the trunk. I was had it hid behind where the"
},
{
"end_time": 3993.848,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3964.206,
"text": " The spare tire was, there was a compartment I had it in there and it was the back of the car, I said, I'm yours. So that's where my new life really started. I had a choice. I could do it. I could stay in that confusion or I said, okay, if this is what you're going to do, I'm yours. So it was the first week I was there, the GBI in Georgia came to me and said, okay, you're going to do some big times, you know, and"
},
{
"end_time": 4002.278,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3994.275,
"text": " I wasn't, and they said, we're going to put you out on 95 and you call your people and tell them you broke down and you've got to come."
},
{
"end_time": 4029.07,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4002.944,
"text": " And I wasn't, I didn't cooperate with them. I was still kind of out of my mind, you know, I was kind of out there, to tell you the truth. I was very, very, you know, you do that much drugs and you're that high for so long, your, your, your reality thinking isn't too good. So, you know, I was still a rock star. I was still a rock star back then, you know, but I knew I had to make a change. You know, I had to, I had to, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 4058.592,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4029.838,
"text": " And so that's where this crazy new part of my life started. And so the GBI came and they didn't. And then I got a lawyer and my girlfriend wanted to, they arrested her. And I said, the only way I can get her out, everybody there got arrested with the girlfriend and the guys all blame the girlfriend. So none of them were guilty. None of them were guilty. You found what in the car? Baby, what did you have in the car? They were all,"
},
{
"end_time": 4081.408,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4059.087,
"text": " So they had they had a you know, the sheriff was he had a hit on him. He was resting he confiscated When I was there 18 million dollars off the 95 Wow and he started and now this is a little further down But he started getting people going to Florida so they had all the informants in the towns telling them what was coming and he started"
},
{
"end_time": 4103.746,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4081.817,
"text": " getting the money before it went to Florida instead of after. Right. And that's a whole nother little piece of the story. Which is really the way they would prefer it. Well, not the judges and lawyers. No. But yeah, that's where this thing gets real crazy. But so with interstate transportation, I got charged with, I got 35 years. That's what they gave me."
},
{
"end_time": 4133.899,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4104.889,
"text": " In Georgia? Well, it was interstate transportation, but I got arrested in Georgia. Right, okay. So it was federal? Federal, yeah. So, you know, it was about three months, and I had three months before my court, before they took me into court, and got a lawyer, and they pleaded for aid. But before that, I had to sign the papers saying I was guilty to get my girlfriend out. And I was trying to save my house, trying to save the recording studio."
},
{
"end_time": 4149.48,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4134.462,
"text": " And so she went back and I signed papers. I said, I'm guilty. I'm not going to. So on the way back from court and I had spaghetti legs, you know, that was before I pleaded. They gave me 35 and I could hardly walk up at the courthouse is 100 yards from the jail."
},
{
"end_time": 4176.271,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4149.889,
"text": " And I was walking back there and I said, man, what did I do? I did it. You know, what's going to happen to me? You know, I got 35 years and my parents, my mother wouldn't even talk to me. Nobody's going to, they'd say, oh, it's good for you to be in jail. Cause I drove everybody, you know, I was insane and the family suffered. The family suffers through our insanity. And so they, my sister, it's the best thing in the world for him. He'll finally get his life back."
},
{
"end_time": 4202.688,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4180.401,
"text": " But anyway, walking back to the jail, there's a little area when you walk into the jail house, and it was a brand new jail because the sheriff had built the courthouse, he built the new jail with money he was taking off in 95. And the sheriff came, unbelievable character."
},
{
"end_time": 4228.166,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4203.268,
"text": " He had a big draw accent. He said, but my girlfriend pleaded that he would talk to me after court. So she gave him a flower, put a card on it. So after jail, he said, okay, I'll talk to him when he gets after court. So he pulled me in his office and he says, son, are you guilty? I said, yes, sir. He says, you know, you're the first guilty person's ever been in my jail."
},
{
"end_time": 4239.804,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4228.592,
"text": " And that's how our friendship started. And they had a says, listen, I might be able to get you a little better on your parole. We're doing a thing saying say no to drugs. And that was Ronnie Reagan's right."
},
{
"end_time": 4264.275,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4240.094,
"text": " And I said, yes, sir. Oh, so you were under the old law. This was before 1986, right? It was actually 1980, the beginning. That's when I got arrested in 86. Okay. So were you under the old law? I don't know. I don't know what was there was parole. Parole was an option. Like you would, you could get parole. You could get parole. Okay. Well, you know, they were still paroling, you know, but, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 4274.206,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4264.957,
"text": " You know, I had two and a half keys in the trunk when I got pulled over. So I said I'm guilty and then they gave me the 35 year sentence."
},
{
"end_time": 4302.585,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4274.684,
"text": " But when I told him that, yeah, I was guilty, he says, listen, I'm going to let you do some testimonies with me. It's election year, and I need somebody to go out and explain what it is to go through your drug addiction and stuff. So I said, thank you, Lord. I didn't know the Lord then. I didn't know anything about God. Right. But I did surrender to him. And that was my first hope. That was something, you know, I was like,"
},
{
"end_time": 4320.93,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4302.978,
"text": " crushed with that 35 year sentence. And then that gave me a little hope that somebody, something possibly could, you know, this guy's going to let me work with him. So the first time I did a testimony for him was in a grade school and that's what I have these shackles"
},
{
"end_time": 4350.213,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4321.203,
"text": " These are my shackles from that time I did that. I always like to pull them out because it kind of, I remember what life was back then. And this was, I was, you know, shackled legs, arms, hands, and then that was putting me in front of a grade school and it really let me see of the bondage I was in. You know, we look at the physical but the spiritual is where the bondage is. Nobody's, you know, we're all"
},
{
"end_time": 4376.63,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4350.674,
"text": " You know, what is freedom? And so this is really my first step in that right, that direction. But like I said, when I do share about my life as what happened, I bring those out and really helps me to connect. That's who I used to be, bound and not free and not ashamed to who I was. I'm not ashamed anymore. Right. You know, I'm an ex-con. I know it. But God is doing something with my life."
},
{
"end_time": 4402.654,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4377.022,
"text": " You know, so that's where it started. And then, you know, I was out doing a talk with him and he was in a suit and he rubbed against the chalkboard. And when I was walking out with him, I grabbed his arm and I, you know, you don't touch anybody like that. And I rubbed off the chalk that was on his suit. And that's where our bond, our friendship really started. And he started trusting me."
},
{
"end_time": 4431.886,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4404.292,
"text": " Then it's amazing thing happened. I got a, I became a trustee in the kitchen. That was a big step getting from, from yellow, uh, from, from the orange shoots into the white suits. And I had a privilege to going down. And so I did flooring. So I said, you know, uh, they just did a brand new kitchen and they had no flooring in it. And I said, well, let me do, let me put some flooring in here for you guys. So I ordered some flooring from Maryland. They shipped it down. I put the flooring in."
},
{
"end_time": 4450.128,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4432.227,
"text": " And I just built cabinets for the library in the jail. And then he started picking me up and I started going with him. So what was illegal? When he picked me up, he took me to Charleston. That's where his family lived."
},
{
"end_time": 4477.739,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4450.128,
"text": " It was against the law to go out of state. I'd say it now, but I wouldn't. So he would take me there. I would drive it. He couldn't drive good. So he had a bad hip. He needed a hip replacement and I would drive him and we became best friends. I started, I probably went, I was out of the jail probably three or four days a week riding around with him. He took me fish. He took me everywhere. I mean, it was just like insanity. And that was, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 4509.019,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4479.326,
"text": " And then after I probably did 15 testimonies in little churches, community groups, and just telling them what was going on and what started going to church. And I didn't, like I said, I didn't know God, but everybody, there is a God, if you don't believe or not, but there is, and I've learned the difference between the dark and the light. So that's where God is using me. I understand what that is. I lived in it."
},
{
"end_time": 4525.282,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4509.565,
"text": " And I started walking a new way. Now, did my drug habit, I hadn't gotten out of jail yet, but my drug habit was did I smoke pot in jail? You know, I tried to get people to send me stuff. The cravings I had just didn't disappear, you know, of my lifestyle."
},
{
"end_time": 4553.217,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4525.759,
"text": " but I wanted to do the right thing. So after doing those testimonies and I said, I said, can you guys get me out of here? The guy that started taking me to church, his uncle was Jim Proctor. He's the sheriff of Woodbine, Georgia right now. So he was the guy that I started communication with. He took me to church with him, his family, and they kind of, his mom on Christmas brought me to his house."
},
{
"end_time": 4571.613,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4553.558,
"text": " They gave me Christmas presents. I was in the kitchen making gravy with his mom. I found out they didn't judge me. That was where I found out, I'll just say, God's love. They loved me like nobody ever did, and it gave me faith that there's hope for me."
},
{
"end_time": 4596.698,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4572.125,
"text": " And that's where my life really started, just from that experience of people that showed me that I had value and stopped judging me because of what I did and gave me a chance to be a new person. And that's where my walk really started. So his uncle was the judge. The Bill Smith and him went to his uncle and said, can we get you out of here? In 18 months I was out."
},
{
"end_time": 4610.896,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4597.585,
"text": " The state penitentiary tried to take me to prison. The sheriff said, I'm not going to let them take you out. You're in the drug program. The sheriff is running a drug program for the feds?"
},
{
"end_time": 4641.988,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4612.654,
"text": " Oh, okay. So that was a big thing. You know, he got in touch later with Janet Reno. It went right up to the, that was Bill Clinton's person we started. Yeah, yeah, she was the U.S. Attorney for Bill Clinton. Yeah, after I got out, I went back to Woodbine and worked with about 12 churches and the jail, started going to the jail ministry there. And he got permission, he spent almost $400,000"
},
{
"end_time": 4665.794,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4641.988,
"text": " to send people to go to Saddleback Church to get recovery ministry leaders. So that was my first big step. So how much time did you spend in prison? 18 months. 18 months on a 36-year sentence? 35 years. 35-year sentence. That's insane. What can I say?"
},
{
"end_time": 4697.227,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4667.585,
"text": " You know, I've seen people for a couple of grams. Yeah. To five years. I was going to say, I've seen guys, you know, they'll bring a gun to a $10 crack deal and get 15 years, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's pretty unbelievable. Yeah. I was going to say, did you, were you on parole? I was on parole. Okay. And when I got out, I got my girlfriend, I went back to Georgia. I still wasn't talking to anybody in my family."
},
{
"end_time": 4713.66,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4697.637,
"text": " And I got married, the sheriff gave my wife to me and the guard gave my wife. It was a little town. You can imagine this is pretty wild. And that's where, you know, because I kind of disconnected from my family because I didn't know how to deal with that. My mother's still an alcoholic."
},
{
"end_time": 4737.773,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4714.121,
"text": " I was the bad guy. It took me two years to see if this was a real deal. Nobody trusted me for the first two years. All the guys were waiting for me to come out of retirement and go back to the old life. So what did you do when you got out? I got a job with a neighbor for $8 an hour as a laborer in a construction company."
},
{
"end_time": 4767.432,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4738.08,
"text": " And I was the happiest. I'm used to walking around with a briefcase full of money. Right. But I was I was had no worries. I didn't have that ton of bricks on my back. And I wasn't going to you know, that was what I did. And, you know, I did you read after I got married, I went back down to Florida. I had Barry. I sent some product down to Barry because I had another place in Fort Lauderdale that I still had a little hideout. And I sent some product down there"
},
{
"end_time": 4796.92,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4767.841,
"text": " And I said, oh, I'm going to get high one more time. And I got high. And I realized I'm not that person anymore. And I was miserable. And I said, I'll never go back. And that was the turning point that this new person I was becoming was real. And I wanted God to use me in a new way. I found some peace that I never had and all the pain and abuse and all that."
},
{
"end_time": 4820.691,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4797.022,
"text": " You know, that wasn't part of my life anymore. So that's where it started. And then came back, got a job working in a flooring company. After I did construction, the guy that sent me that tile that I did the jail, I did flooring for a little bit before I got, I was dealing, but I still had a job at a flooring company called Horizon Floors."
},
{
"end_time": 4843.217,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4821.288,
"text": " And I was still dealing with drugs and rugs at that time. But went back and he had a big company, a Jewish man that was really a mentor kind of teaching me business and learning how to do business to be successful in the system instead of the way I was. You know, I had a talent, but I wasn't doing it legally."
},
{
"end_time": 4869.172,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4843.865,
"text": " So I did that for about three years and he wanted me to come on staff and salary. And, you know, I didn't, I was 26,000 in debt. The house I had had, you know, that drywall fell, had holes in the roof and, you know, just building my trust up with my family. It took about two years and then I became the walking miracle."
},
{
"end_time": 4898.387,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4869.582,
"text": " And my mom worked out a deal that I could have the property because I was the youngest and my sisters had moved. And that would be an inheritance that she gave my sister so much. And then that would be my inheritance. So I had a piece of property, just did two years with Burt. And I said, well, I'm going to open my own flooring company. So I paid off all my debt. I paid my mom the $26,000 and then had nobody after me."
},
{
"end_time": 4926.937,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4899.087,
"text": " and then I got involved in a little flooring company and I saved up $26,000. I went to the bank and asked them to match it. One of the jobs I got, another Jewish friend of mine was going to do a big project, 126 town homes, and he awarded me the job. So I went to the bank, borrowed money,"
},
{
"end_time": 4954.036,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4927.21,
"text": " And that was the start of Craftmaster Interiors. So me and my wife started that company. I had this piece of property. It was four acres. We started working on subdividing that. And then we opened up a company in DC. I had Craftmasters of DC and Craftmasters of Maryland. That went on for 18 years or 10 years. And then she got in an accident."
},
{
"end_time": 4968.763,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 4955.043,
"text": " She gave her life to the Lord, but she didn't quit using. She started drinking and got in a car accident and started doing Oxycontin. That was the real turning point of her downfall."
},
{
"end_time": 4995.265,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 4969.087,
"text": " She had a lot of resentments of family. She had a rough abuse of things when she was young and could never forgive the people and all that that went through it. Her drug addiction got hard. It was the roughest. We were married 18 years. That was the roughest. I wouldn't give up on her, but it was the roughest thing. She's a brilliant business person. Like I said, we had the two companies. The right"
},
{
"end_time": 5024.206,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 4995.913,
"text": " As she got that accident and we started really having problems and she was overdosing. I was running into the hospital about every three months. You know, it was just, it was, you know, it's kind of what I put everybody through. Now I was trying to, I had to go through that with her and I didn't give up on her, but she passed. After a big job in DC, we went on a cruise to St. Martin's and she passed away on a ship. She overdosed."
},
{
"end_time": 5050.691,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5024.667,
"text": " Her body just gave out. She died down in the sick bay. How long ago was this? That was 2009 she passed away. 2008 or 2009. I'm not sure exactly. I was doing a whole city block of buildings from Davis Construction. I was doing about a six million dollar job, had about 30 guys working."
},
{
"end_time": 5065.333,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5050.691,
"text": " pretty successful. She was doing all the taxes. I was still not learning how to read and write very good, so I was trusting her to do the business. But when she passed"
},
{
"end_time": 5092.415,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5065.486,
"text": " You know, I continue, but I always had this vision. God really touched me about helping guys, especially incarceration guys, reentry. That's my heart. I mentioned that to you. You know, like I said, there's so many gifted guys in bars that if they don't get it, if they don't realize they got to get it right, they're always going to be there. Right. And you've taken what you've been through and use your personality and your gifts to do what you're doing now, which is unbelievable."
},
{
"end_time": 5121.732,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5093.012,
"text": " But for me, God said, I have tremendous blessing with the Lord, meaning he's let me develop a way to help men with addiction. I'm kind of getting ahead of myself. After she passed, I had the business and really felt God calling me to find a piece of property to open up a recovery center."
},
{
"end_time": 5144.053,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5122.176,
"text": " and so that's where my heart was and I gave really gave the company and put it in my secretary's hands and I had three people in the office and I hired a new tax accountant because you know I never filed anything my wife did it all and I was kind of scared it might fall apart so"
},
{
"end_time": 5169.787,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5144.855,
"text": " I found a lady I was doing recovery with at a church, Celebrate Recovery at the time, and that's what the sheriff helped me do back in Woodbine, send everybody there. So I got involved with Chuck Colson and some very big ministries, but because of me being my ex-con, I really didn't get, they kind of shut the door on me, doors didn't open for me. It's like,"
},
{
"end_time": 5197.637,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5169.855,
"text": " Unless you've been there, sometimes people don't understand what that's all about. It's kind of a good old boys club. It's like opening a halfway house. It's like federal judges. It's hard to open a halfway house. You would think that they'd want as many open as possible. When I did Celebrate Recovery, I went to a jail and I went every Saturday for eight years."
},
{
"end_time": 5226.323,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5198.012,
"text": " And really, you know, it broke my heart when a guy his time's up and I said, where are you going? He says, well, I'll be back here because this is where, you know, they get used to the system. Instead of learning, they can do it outside. And there's nobody. A lot of churches come in and tell them about God, but they they need an experience. They don't need somebody telling them they need to be shown this can be real. And that's really what God has done with my life is saying this can be real. You can get it right."
},
{
"end_time": 5247.858,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5226.8,
"text": " And it's a way that God has showed me that works. And so after being in there and working with guys for about eight years, just realized I had to do something to get them a place to come and have a chance to start over. And so it took me about 10 years to find a place. It was a God story of"
},
{
"end_time": 5273.029,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5248.302,
"text": " of what that was. It was really hard to get the money, and so I sold everything I had. We got married again. Me and my wife sold everything we had. I had two houses. I had a couple Mercedes. She had a townhouse, and then I was searching for property, and we bought 16 acres in Woodbine, Maryland."
},
{
"end_time": 5294.445,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5273.387,
"text": " It used to be an old French restaurant and it was a sanitarium for that for women. It housed 26 women. And then somebody turned it into a French restaurant. On 16 acres? You don't need 16 acres for that. It's just a beautiful, it's just a really beautiful, it's in the countryside. It's really a beautiful piece of property and it was built in 1862."
},
{
"end_time": 5324.224,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5294.445,
"text": " I would say you could put all those two businesses on one acre so you just got a whole bunch of acreage also. Yeah and I was trying to get something not close to anybody because you know when you bring people in with addiction. Yeah of course the neighbors get upset. Everybody wants halfway houses and they want rehabilitation but they just don't want it in their neighborhood. Right. So anyway I did it very slowly and the first not even eight months"
},
{
"end_time": 5354.616,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5324.991,
"text": " So the IRS calls me and I get one, when they shut one business countdown, it was 46,000. And I said, what, nobody, what are you doing? What are you doing? And I had a big tax firm, big money. I paid them a lot of money. And in a month's time I had $500,000 and I just spent every cent that I had on this property. And I said, oh my goodness, I'm going to lose everything. I thought everything was going to collapse."
},
{
"end_time": 5378.422,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5354.991,
"text": " I learned how to go through a really hard time. I fired the... So, the IRS showed up. For what reason? You hadn't been paid? It was a year. The girls in the office that I trusted and the new tax firm, they didn't give them all the information. I just did these big, huge projects and the money that I spent was money that should have been"
},
{
"end_time": 5408.712,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5378.968,
"text": " spent for taxes and I didn't, nobody told me that's what it was and I was trusting the girls that my wife, my first wife taught and they were putting the letters and the stuff for the IRS in a pile and I didn't get it until I got pulled aside. So my office that I didn't run I thought was doing a good job got me and I spent the money I should have been spending on taxes. I sold a house, I thought this was all profit and"
},
{
"end_time": 5436.476,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5409.292,
"text": " And I had this big firm that I hired to say, you make sure you do this tax work with them so I don't get in trouble. And they didn't do that either. So I had to work my way out of that 500,000. I still had the company open, the flooring company. But that was, in the Bible it says, you know, moving mountains, you know, God does move mountains because there's a reason he let me experience all this and he got me through that too."
},
{
"end_time": 5465.572,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5436.971,
"text": " I started working, got a couple jobs, and I fired the tax accountants, and I went right in with this little country accountant, and went and visited the IRS myself. I was kind of fearful, but I said, these guys are getting me in more trouble. I had a $50,000 bill from the tax company that I hired to keep me from paying taxes, and I said, I'm not going to do this. I'll just do it myself. So I worked through that, got all my bills paid."
},
{
"end_time": 5490.247,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5466.186,
"text": " Got that 500. I went and negotiated every bill. It probably came down to about 300, but I got it all done. Right. You negotiate with the IRS for the debt. Yeah. You're never getting the 500. You may get 300, but you'll never get five. Yeah. So that worked out. So that's been 12 years that I've got the property and building the ministry or second chance center."
},
{
"end_time": 5519.172,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5490.947,
"text": " And now I'm really at a point where, you know, I've been very under the radar with what we do and, you know, just trying to, I want to build a place for guys to learn trades. Also, I've got a construction company. I've got a culinary chef. I just remodeled a kitchen in the building so guys could learn culinary school."
},
{
"end_time": 5539.309,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5519.531,
"text": " and also a fire alarm company. I've got three ways to teach them a new trade if they want to learn a new trade and a new way to live. So that's taken 12 years to get it to where a guy could have a chance to have a new life and reentry. There's a Kairos ministry that goes into jails."
},
{
"end_time": 5556.544,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5539.855,
"text": " And they spend a weekend working with guys and they just, because of the pandemic, they haven't been letting them go back in. They're doing that and I'm going to work with them. I'm going to keep at least four beds open for guys that are in prison that really want it because everybody talks about it."
},
{
"end_time": 5584.94,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5556.971,
"text": " You know, you got to really want it to make it work. Well, how many guys do you have right now? Right now I've got 10 guys and it kind of alternates. Eight is what I'm capable because a couple of guys will leave or whatever. Right. And I'm rezoning to get hopefully 16 to 20 guys. That's the, I've rebuilt the property from A to Z. You know, right now that's what we're doing is rezoning. And I had to build kind of a following and right now we have,"
},
{
"end_time": 5608.353,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5585.538,
"text": " about $95,000 a year from just people sending money in, because I haven't gotten paid for 12 years. My wife doesn't get paid. I just do this because of my heart. I'm not looking for money. I'm trying to build this for the next generation because things are getting tough out here. So right now we've got $95,000 a year to pay. I've got two young men. One of them has been through the program."
},
{
"end_time": 5631.954,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5608.746,
"text": " I've got to raise up about at least $150,000 a year in donations to meet the $400,000 a year bill at cost to keep the property open. Somehow God keeps sending people to help, and this connection of coming here to talk to you has been quite unique. Yeah, I was going to say the guy that contacted me had been through the program. He is a graduate, yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 5652.039,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5632.227,
"text": " Okay, so now you've"
},
{
"end_time": 5682.244,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5652.5,
"text": " Are you you feel you good? I'm really good. I mean, I think, you know, and then, you know, the book we have and I've got another book I'm doing. Colby will put it in the description box. Right. So I think it's on Amazon. I think you can get it on Amazon if somebody wants it. Yeah. Like I said, working on everything's on Amazon. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a picture of my grandfather. That's the guy that OK. He was a pretty gangster guy."
},
{
"end_time": 5711.425,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5685.043,
"text": " I think last time I talked to him was about eight months ago and he has always been in touch. He's the sweetheart of a guy, just a sincere, a guy that would die for you. That was the guys that I worked with. That's a guy, Dale. My little family was a tough little family, you know. That's how I put around me to keep from"
},
{
"end_time": 5729.889,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5711.886,
"text": " Making sure I didn't go down before I surrendered, if you want to call it that. Is there anything else that I, anything I didn't ask? I think that's, you know, I have an unbelievable wife now. It's been a huge part, you know. I'm a faith-based program."
},
{
"end_time": 5748.899,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5729.889,
"text": " I don't push anything on anybody. I respect other people, but it was my ticket to a new life. I know Jesus Christ. I'm not a preacher, but I know what He did for me and how my life changed."
},
{
"end_time": 5776.664,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5749.411,
"text": " I appreciate what God has done with you one way or the other. He's using you to help people and that's huge. That's a blessing. Are you good? Did I do okay? Yeah. I just wanted to make sure that I didn't miss anything. I think that's pretty much the layout. There's a lot of detail I didn't"
},
{
"end_time": 5797.278,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5777.056,
"text": " Hey, I appreciate you guys watching the video. If you like the interview, do me a favor and hit the subscribe button. Hit the bell so you get notified of videos like this."
},
{
"end_time": 5822.79,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 5797.619,
"text": " It started with a scream inside a quiet Maryland home."
},
{
"end_time": 5847.824,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 5823.37,
"text": " A mother trying to protect the family dog and her son in the grip of a violent hallucinogenic rage. By the time it was over, she was dead, and he claimed LSD made him do it. His name, David Minor IV, and we talked to him. Listen to Invisible Choir every other week as we uncover the most haunting true crimes you've never heard of, available wherever you get your podcasts."
}
]
}No transcript available.